I love the “cassette-futurism” aesthetic / niche, but hadn’t really thought about it for some time, until I hit up our FV community just now, and submitted a little article about an item I found, yesterday.
Problem? I happened to notice that in that /c, the prior posts dated to 2mos ago, and that currently, the place is effectively dormant, if not outright dead. This to me is a right-old shame, given that 200+ posts had been made there already, meaning to me that a sincere & sustained effort had been made to launch it and keep it going for a quite a while, until… well. Whatever happened.
Just in general, though-- I would think that anyone who’s been a part of the Fediverse for a while has noticed the heavy trend of communities being created all the time, with most of them crashing and burning relatively shortly thereafter. Or others, persisting for a while, until the creators or contributors dried up at some point.
Still, at the end of the day, the FV is full of dead communities that succumbed for one reason or another, and that’s unfortunately just sort of… natural, right? That said, I do not like it when it happens to concepts and communities that I love and support!
So what’s my point, here?
Er… well… I was thinking that maybe as a group-effort, some of us might-potentially rotate our posts a bit between communities that we wanted to support, to help keep them going?
Obviously that would need to be cross-organised in terms of groups of people and groups of communities, but I’m wondering if maybe that might help in such situations? For example, let’s say that every week I create 1-3 posts for a rotating schedule of critical communities I appreciate, so to speak. And others in the sign-up list do the same, see? In which case we together help keep those communities going on until they potentially ‘catch fire’ in a larger, self-sustaining sense, so to speak. Or something like that?
Not sure if all that makes sense, but… there it is.
I view Subscribed only. A reminder to check out All occasionally would help.
Right, but here’s where things can ‘slip away,’ so to speak-- at several points I’ve attempted to curate and grow my Subscribed list based on active communities, only to later realise that a lot of them had since gone dead over a relatively short time (let’s say ~6mos).
If I hadn’t manually remembered to go back and check on them, I wouldn’t have realised that, for most of those /c’s. So, sort of a different phenomenon than browsing All, where you’re reminded of active communities because of the recent posts people had made.
Maybe if there was some sort of tool or feature to show content from dormant /c’s, that could help. For example on Reddit, old posts from various subs routinely show up when I browse by MultiReddit. At the very least, that reminds me about those subs, and indeed sometimes gets me curious enough to go back and look at them.
Do you know about the personal feed feature on Piefed? They are basically multireddits. I’m asking because I think I’ve seen you mentioning it elsewhere.
I remember learning about curated feeds, but I might have missed the “My Feed” feature. Looks pretty good!
So, basically the PF counterpart to MultiReddits?
Exactly! Enjoy, you’ll see they are quite nice
So this is more of a client thing than a Lemmy thing, but it would be nice, when viewing all, to have a very easy interface to block a community you know you will never be interested in. Maybe it’s not so bad any more, but shortly after I first joined All was full of repost bots posting to instances that were nothing but reddit reposts. What the fuck is the point of browsing AskReddit or AITA or similar when OP isn’t even on Lemmy?
Reducing friction to weed out communities that are in a foreign language but posting as unspecified, or country-specific communities, or niches that I have no interest in would help me browse All a lot more often.
Edit: And of course I just learned I can long-click on a community name in Voyager to block the community. Problem solved.
This is my suggestion - campaign to promote viewing all, and sorting by new. That way, niche comms can stay small, but still be appreciated by those who like the content. No forcing to grow. Like cool rocks - I feel bad I haven’t put content there, but like one should only do so when they want to show a cool rock and that shouldn’t have to be all the time just so a comm doesn’t die.