“There are really good people who are compassionate, sympathetic, empathetic, and they want to do something to help,” Gilberg said of the disaster and its aftermath. “And then there are others who … smell an opportunity to profit, and that’s what I encountered.”
Hm… I appreciate it but that feels like cheating a little bit, no? I think I am happy for it to grow organically and see where that takes me. I don’t even want to post to !newcommunities@lemmy.world until I’ve sorted out the moderation and rules and it has a nice little swell of content.
It won’t grow organically if others can’t see it federated to their instance to discover it.
All this does is help get you the chance to be discovered.
But fair on the waiting for rules and stuff. It’s a very spur of the moment community creation from what I saw.
I replied to Blaze clarifying my thinking on it a little bit more… I’m not trying to say it’s a bad thing, maybe “cheating” was the wrong word.
But something interesting jumped out at me when I looked at the list of instances that !usa@ponder.cat is federated to as of right now:
I removed three entries from the list where it’s basically only one user I can think of who’s heavily active from that instance, to avoid doxxing anyone’s subscriptions.
So one interesting thing is that I made basically 0 effort to promote it, and it’s still starting to get a little bit of a wide reach. I’m sure that lemmy-federate.com will speed the process, but I’m not sure it’s by any means necessary, I think a community will reach all the main instances pretty quickly if there’s any kind of activity / promotion around it at all. I know some of that was people subscribing on purpose to federate it, but hear me out, that ties in with the second thing.
The second, a little bit more fascinating thing, is that it’s missing some of what I think of as the “main” instances. No Beehaw, no slrpnk, no lemmy.world, no blahaj. But it’s got almost all of the ones that I think of as the “nice” instances, missing only lemm.ee off the top of my head.
I think it’s possible that Lemmy is just now getting big enough to fracture into little multi-instance networks, so that instead of every community being a “main” community that everyone can know about and goes everywhere, sort of one big Reddit-like experience hosted on multiple servers, I think we’re transitioning to an era of multiple interrelated social networks on interrelated servers. That already happens, but I think it’s going to happen more and more so. Certainly it’s going to happen if the users grow into the millions and we have more communities than anyone could ever make sense of in one global list.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing, if my community becomes more emphasized on those instances than it does on lemmy.world. I am sure lemmy.world is coming, but I think maybe I actually kind of want it to grow as a thing that’s more focused on some of the culture of the instances listed above. Maybe with exceptions. But I definitely like the idea of it being culturally more of an emphasis on those users, than just blasted to “everyone” and everyone can automatically blast back, at least for a little while.
@Blaze@feddit.org
It’s not cheating, it’s avoiding having to rely on 20 alts to get the community visible to most of the instances. I used to do that for communities before, the site option is definitely better
IDK, maybe “cheating” was the wrong phrasing. I’m just saying I think it’s okay if people from big instances get it instantly as I post the normal promotions of it (it’s already federated to 16 instances), and small instances get to stay small and get new federated communities as their users choose to pick them up “naturally” because of their users hearing about them. Actually, I am guessing that a single post to !newcommunities@lemmy.world would get it federated to all or very close to all of the lemmy-federate places. No?
Weirdly enough, it is not federated to lemmy.world and a couple of the other big instances right now, but maybe that’s a good thing. For a lot of communities I think it might not be bad if they stay as a more niche community until a good amount of content and culture is established. For this one, I think it won’t matter as much because LW is going to do what they do regardless the instant federation is turned on, but for more conversation-based communities I could see small growth numerically working out better.