We have received numerous reports from users about the closure of the c/android community. While we fully support the original community owners’ decision to move to another instance, it will eventually be necessary to open up the community on Lemmy.world. The beauty of the fediverse is that multiple communities on the same subject can exist in different instances. However, if you can no longer moderate a community on Lemmy for any reason, it is important to pass it on to individuals who are willing and able to do so.
To ensure the best interests of our instance members, it is necessary to establish boundaries. Holding onto a community name cannot be a permanent arrangement. It’s important to consider our users’ ongoing interest in the community if they wish it to continue. While we acknowledge the objective of consolidating communities, current community members ultimately decide whether they wish to join the new community at lemdro.id.
To ensure a smooth transition, we will keep the community locked for another week, providing ample time to inform the active user base about the move to the new instance at https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected].
I mean Mastodon has thousands of instances, many with thousands of active users and generally they all talk to each other.
The Linux community is wide open. Distros rise and fall. There was a time when everything was Red Hat based. Then Ubuntu came along and taught a whole new generation. Smaller distros like Gentoo got bigger. New distros like Arch appeared. And then some of us realized we actually liked just plain Debian all along. (Sorry Slackware users, I didn’t follow your journey). This didn’t happen because everyone chose the exact same thing.
Sure Linux distos have a commonality, same kernel (but configured differently) and same applications (but packaged differently), but we have that with Lemmy too. Lemmy speaks ActivityPub. Kbin speaks ActivityPub. (Also Mastodon). But Lemmy and Kbin have different UIs. In fact some Lemmy’s have different UIs.
And sure, a community can’t be zero people talking. But it also can’t be a billion people talking. And yes with Lemmy being newer it’s going to be easier to fragment. With only a few thousand active users per instance I understand the desire to stick together. But remember your not trapped on your own instance. Maybe we need two Android communities. Maybe ten. Maybe just one. I already know we apparently can support a shit ton of meme communities.
You’re fundamentally not understanding the issue here. Mastodon isn’t the same kind of content as lemmy, a link aggregator and forum. Microbloging doesn’t have user curation, it has algorithmic curation. The only control you have over your feed on a site like mastodon, threads, or Twitter is by who you follow and they just throw all of those posts into a endless list filled with disorganized nonsense. You don’t need to centralize communities there because there is no community to centralize. It’s like millions of people are in a room and they’re all shouting at once. Link agregators are the exact opposite of this. There is direct democratic curation superseded by moderation to keep communities focused and topical. You follow communities that will curate relevat content to their state topic and if those communities are not centralized you can’t interact with them as effectively if they were. There is no reason for any individual game or media franchise to be divided across more than just 1 page unless the amount of topics and content they can produce necessitates dividing specific facets of that community to not cannibalize the limited space the sites format allows for. Some games force esports content into it’s own subreddit and this severally hampers the visibility of that game on Reddit, or they divide out the meme posts because the sub is so filled with regular postings and discussion that they would get in the way and lose nothing by being segregated, unlike esports. Franchises like star wars don’t have posts about Jedi survivor or the old republic on their main sub because those games generate their own content that most people who don’t play those games do not care about. So yes, there are some reasons to divide communities, but there is not a strong reason to make more than 1 community for virtually anything on a site this small. There should only be 1 place to talk about Android here, for the time being, because there are simply not enough people to sustain more than that regardless of what your feeling on decentralizing communities are.
Decentralizing any community into small groups is exactly how you kill a community. People want to feel like they’re apart of a large group and that they can interact with everyone who shares that interest. It helps that community grow and by pushing them apart you’re essentially forcing them to choose what tribe they want to join and inviting tribalism when in reality they’re all the exact same people who we are dividing because we lack the technical capabilities to unite them.
You can be a member of as many Android communities as you want. You don’t have to pick just one. The community isn’t divided. They can even share 90% of the same people.
There is no harm in giving each instance a shot at running the best Android community. If all but one sucks, then that one will naturally be the one people stay subscribed to.
why do these 2 communities exist if 90% of their users are exactly the same? this isn’t a real scenario, this doesn’t happen. everyone congregates to the biggest group.
I’m currently subscribed to gaming/games on lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works and kbin.social.
Each of those seems to be an active community.
If users from one choose to all congregate to one, that’s fine. But if all three want to exist, that’s great too.
Some people post, some people comment and some people lurk. Yes, 90% of posters across three communities probably doesn’t make sense. But commenters? Lurkers? That’s probably fine.