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.
JohnnyEnzyme What I mean is curating their communities, ensuring they have mods for them, shuttering any that are inactive, and finding other sites they can partner with to split community loads.
You know, actually taking responsibility for the social network they’re running, rather than treating them like some sort of natural phenomenon that just suddenly sprung up on domains they purchased.
Well yeah, and I think that gets back to what I was saying above. As a user, you certainly want to see the best possible outcome with all that, but it’s not so often the case, for various reasons. I think it also helps to remember that these are hobbies and passion-projects, and dealing with people is both a skillset and something that commonly drains the one trying to make the effort.
Sounds like you have something or someone specifically in mind with that. In any case, I’m not really sure how widespread that problem might be on the Fediverse, and not sure how places like that would survive for very long, given that users can just go elsewhere to avoid all that.
JohnnyEnzyme No, I just believe that hosting a site like this is a responsibility, and that responsibility extends beyond keeping the hamster alive. If someone wants to run a hobby site, they can run a single-user instance.
How are instances not hobby sites when most of them make little or no money? Or actually lose money…?
I see where @[email protected] comes from. I would also prefer large instances (let’s say any instance above 100 monthly active users) to regularly prune communities, lock the inactive ones, etc.
It’s not happening however, but not sure how much us users can do, there’s no real pressure on large instance admins to do so. Not sure how we can solve this.
Maybe I’m missing something, but that stuff seems pretty dang low-priority on the list to me. Also, if a good case was made by concerned users, then I would guess that the admins would tend to go along with such community recommendations. Making it a community issue, essentially.
Lastly, is it actually wise to prune communities just because they’re inactive? They may have good content after all, and someone may one day come along to revive such communities.
Ok, I have an example that’s really close to me. At the moment, I regularly post on [email protected] .
On the same topic, there is
None of them are active. The last posts are from at best last week, but usually it’s more last month.
But each mods wants to keep their own version open instead of posting to [email protected] .
Another example: I love Timberborn, it’s a video game. But then you have [email protected] hasn’t had a post in months. If a new joiners sees it, it will just give them the impression the whole platform is empty. Locking it and redirect to [email protected] would make more sense.
Thanks for the examples. That helped me understand.
Yeah, that’s an important point I’d forgotten about. So maybe lock it, but still keep an option to explore it as desired before jumping users off to an active place.
Also, try to make it clear to users searching communities when they’re closed, to minimise their wasted time and potential frustration.
Yeah, I can definitely see this as an issue that’s not going to go away on its own, and will in fact only snowball…
Exactly. That way you keep the archive, but point people to where the activity is.