cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/7214793
Hello again!
So we, the food and cooking community mods, have been discussing merging a few of the communities together. We’re pretty fractured at the moment and we don’t really have the userbase to support so many niche communities so we’re looking at merging some. We previously pinned a post asking users to cross-post to relevant communities and some of the feedback we received is some don’t like this as it can clutter their feeds. Also there were many suggestions of merging until we get more growth and can support more nice communities.
So the plan would be to merge !askculinary, !bbq, !cooking, !food, and !recipes. This would combine a lot of the more general food communities into one and hopefully we reduce cross posting as well as grow users and content. Later, if we have a larger userbase that can support more niche communities, we can spin them off again. So, before moving forward with the merge, we wanted to make sure you all are aware of the plans as well as get some feedback on this decision. So please let us know what you think. We look forward to hearing your thoughts! Thanks!
EDIT: To explain how this would work, we have a couple options:
Lock all the niche communities and leave a pinned post pointing to the main Food community. Later we may reopen them once the userbase grows to support them.
Leave all communities open and cross post from the niche communities to the main one. So when you post a recipe to !recpies@lemmy.world, it would get crossposted to !food@lemmy.world. !food@emmy.world would be a catch all if you wanted the “fire hose” approach. Or you can sub to the niche communities you want.
Ngl I do kinda like option 1 to prevent a bunch of duplicate posts in the feed, but if thats the choice we should have some kind of parameter for when reopening would be appropriate. Like a yearly check in post, or a total sub size, or something.
Good idea! This is why we don’t to do anything without community feedback
I have no idea what the mod tools and such are like on Lemmy, so I don’t know how feasible it is, but I feel like a good way to do it would be to enforce tagging posts, and once we hit a certain threshold of users using that tag the relevant community gets reopened
Making up numbers on the fly, but maybe something like after 100 different users have made posts with a certain tag and at least 10 of them have made at least 5 posts the relevant community gets reopened, and the main cooking community makes a stickied post and makes some automod comments or something advertising that it’s back open.
A lot of online communities get a lot of their content from a handful of power-users, so making sure that you have a handful of people who are repeatedly making relevant content I think is just as important as making sure you have bulk people who may only contribute occasionally, which is why I included having some users who have made multiple posts
Also when that critical mass is reached, some strategic timing for when to reopen them may be a good idea. Might get some extra buzz and activity to kick things off by reopening BBQ a couple weeks before memorial day when people are getting ready for summer cookouts and ask culinary around November as people are starting to plan for thanksgiving and Christmas