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Is it mandatory to do these discussions in the specific communities? The annoying thing about these anime specific communities, is that they always show up completely empty for me. I’m guessing because no one from my instance has subscribed to it, but it’s still not a great experience and I don’t really want to subscribe to those communities just for when it’s airing (if that even fixes it) and then unsubscribe later to prevent clogging up my feed and subscriptions.
You are correct in that the lack of posts for your instance would be because nobody on your instance has subscribed. The first time that somebody on your instance searches the community, it will fetch the most recent 20 (iirc) posts and pull them in, but without comments or votes. Unfortunate side effects of how federation is implemented in lemmy… Once there is a user subbed to a community on your instance, everything from that point forward will federate over as normal. I am sorry that these kinds of federation quirks are impacting you this way! I also wish that I could create an instance-agnostic url to point this post at, but unfortunately that is also not possible within lemmy. Instead, I have to settle for using the instance-agnostic community links in the post body.
The rationale for letting show-specific communities host their own discussion threads is to help introduce those communities to a wider audience in the fediverse. The lemmy and lemmy-compatible userbase is small enough that splitting across threads/communities seemed counter-productive.
I think it is a fair criticism to say that doing it this way is dumb. At the end of the day, I opted against centralizing all the discussions to this community to allow for smaller communities to try and grow/earn users. However, that is a judgement call I made, and I am far from infallible. I am open to other users telling me that this isn’t how this should work as well.
I do want to reassure you and others that if a community-run series like this is overly late or stops making the threads, then I am more than willing to reassume creating the posts in this community, and it is something that I keep track of on my end.
Edit:
All that said, people did basically use this thread last week as an impromptu discussion thread. I am not going to remove comments from these threads (within the rules anyway). So, feel free to use it that way, but know that it won’t be the primary endpoint for discussion.
The rationale for letting show-specific communities host their own discussion threads is to help introduce those communities to a wider audience in the fediverse. The lemmy and lemmy-compatible userbase is small enough that splitting across threads/communities seemed counter-productive.
I see where you’re coming from, but I think this rationale makes more sense for centralized platforms like Reddit, where federation isn’t an issue. I wonder how effective it is, seeing as it’s very easy to conclude that the community is inactive or dead if you’re from another instance and only see (bot)posts without any comments or upvotes. That’s what I thought for a while anyway with many of these anime specific communities, like with Delicious in Dungeon. It felt like there was no place to discuss as a result. (Off topic, but these federation complications are also one of the reasons why I don’t think decentralized platforms are the be-all-end-all like many seem to think. It’s very user-unfriendly) Then again, I suppose it’d be harder to find those communities at all due to the federation stuff without the promotion of the anime community.
All that said, people did basically use this thread last week as an impromptu discussion thread. I am not going to remove comments from these threads (within the rules anyway).
Good to hear. Thanks for the response.
I agree, I would never subscribe to such a specific community, and the decentralization, to my eye, leads to less user engagement; if one of these link posts doesn’t have comments, I’m less inclined to even click on it in the first place.
Thanks for the feedback! Both you and @ReluctantZen@feddit.nl have given me some things to think about going forward. I don’t think there is a perfect solution in which we would be able to effectively help the smaller communities grow and centralize discussion in one place.
I am currently leaning toward keeping Dan Da Dan running like it is now since the season is underway, but not doing this kind of arrangement going forward. Then again, I had initially resisted doing this with Delicious in Dungeon, but then switched mid-season and I think it went generally well. We had a couple weeks where dual threads were made, according to the wiki.
The caveat to Delicious in Dungeon is that was all in the Winter 2024 season, where no bot-made threads happened and all threads were being done by users individually. So, having @MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz step up and run the threads for that show filled a niche that the bot couldn’t at that time because it didn’t exist yet.
These days, having a community run its own threads for a show is honestly a lot more work for me. So, if it isn’t really accomplishing the goal of helping small communities grow and it is frustrating users of the main anime community, then it might be easier to allow threads to exist in both communities. I might think about ways to still try to promote a specific community, perhaps adding something to the post body for certain shows linking to the community (if one exists). I just need to find time to do the backend work for this.
I’ll think about it! Thanks again for the input!
