We, if anything, need to stop making a community for every single edgecase that someone might ever one day want to talk about, and focus on the basics, until there's enough people interested in some random niche thing to justify adding the community.

That is to say, it should be organic community growth led by users making a more specific community from a larger community, and not server admins making, for example, 421,000 different sports team communities hoping users will somehow magically appear and use any of them.

Lemmy is still at the scale that a single /c/NFL could more than adequately handle the entire volume of people talking about NFL games, and we don't really need a /c/ for each league, team, player, and coach or whatever.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 0 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I agree with you, but not sure if that's what the person above meant.

But yeah, centralization should happen. We could probably close 95% of the existing communities and regroup on the last 5%

!football@lemmy.world for instance covers most of the needs for that sport

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 1 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

My read was 'we need to make more communities, AND we need more users' and I'm not sure why more communities solves anything since I've shown Lemmy to several actual real touch-grass kind of friends and they're all like 'but why? there's nothing there.'

Which is both very wrong, and completely understandable because if you go searching for a community about something, you'll find a whole lot of no activity ones and that's just a misleading and confusing presentation which they're taking the wrong impression away from.

I don't think there's a group of users who are just sitting out there waiting for a community about Longaberger baskets to make the jump off reddit, but there are a LOT of people who would move if it looks like it's not just another "reddit killer" with lots of empty zones of nothingness.

[–] Cryophilia@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago

My point was that needing more people is the root issue. So while I didn't explicitly make your point, I do agree.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 1 points 3 weeks ago

with lots of empty zones of nothingness.

Indeed. Trying to solve this with !fedigrow@lemm.ee, but it takes time

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

But yeah, centralization should happen.

Fam, we are here precisely because we don't want centralization.

If you want that, Reddit and Facebook and BS are that way.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

There's a balance to be made. Ultimate defederation is everyone on their own 1-user community.

At the moment, there are plenty of similar communities which coexist, struggling to stay active on their own, and could join just to have more activity. Note that I'm against the current LW-centralization trend, that's another topic: https://lemm.ee/post/30444527

Example