Personally, I love Beehaw's minimalistic approach to communities.
I like that the admins have decided on quality over quantity when it comes to communities. For example, there is only one gaming community instead of breaking everyone into several smaller subsets. It increases interaction and exposes you to other subtopics that might spark your interest.
I hope moving forward they continue with this approach!
It’s fine for now. But I very much would prefer a general gaming community for major topics that anybody familiar or not with games can discuss, but also will need more specific communities for discussing:
PCGaming (including what components are a steal or required theses days, games that are only on Pc or to be ported,etc)
SteamDeck (just coming out last year it has daily information that needs to be passed around to users) l
TableTopgames (convention talk, deals, reissues of old games making comebacks, what games for party sizes, best snacks, etc).
And many more communities that aren’t just for me.
All of these communities end up getting lost in a larger group like Gaming. Cross posting is not a symptom of having too many communities. It is a symptom of moderating gone wrong and (for reddits case) karma farming.
I assume tha different people with a gaming channel or magazine will start their own specific niche gaming Instances. Without a single company in charge there's more reasons for other parties to have their own instance.
Agreed. I'm enjoying seeing a front page filled with discussions on various topics rather than low effort memes copied across countless identical communities.
I really love it, beehaw’s approach is to make a proper community rather than just a shotgun approach of a “Reddit replacement”
So this instance can really be it’s own self contained community - yes you can subscribe to other instances etc but this is “home” and has well thought out communities to let people chat about what they care about without needing a million super specialised (and inevitably empty) communities.
I'm enjoying it so far. I do think it encourages more discussion and a greater variety of topics and opinions in one place (less of a hive mind).
As the platform grows, some communities will probably end up splitting up into more specific / popular areas. Hopefully that will happen naturally though, when those breakout-communities are big enough to sustain themselves and keep things interesting.
But for now at least, Beehaw's definitely got the right idea. :)
It's fine now when there aren't nearly as many users, but I don't see it scaling long term unless hashtags are a thing or something like that. Even something simple like gaming, over on reddit I'm in several very active subs - pcgaming, playstation, playstation4, several zelda subs, etc. If fediverse alternatives get to even 1/4 of the userbase that reddit has, the gaming (or whatever) portion is going to be such a firehose it won't really be usable. And IIRC this is how it played out on reddit as well. I think (though could be mistaken) reddit started with a fairly small set of subs and it wasn't until later that you could create your own subs.
I think it's a really good move. Keep everyone together while we're smaller, and then as one or two games start to dominate the feed (Fortnite or LoL or something) they can split those communities out so they can explore their niche game needs without annoying the rest of the users, and just keep doing that indefinitely.
couldn’t agree more, been absolutely blown away by transparency and commitment of values here. It’s been an amazing change to even have viability into the issues and integrity with actions.
I really like it too. I feel like it's good to have a more diverse group of people and topics in each little space, keeps it lively. I wouldn't run into most of those conversations offline or in a more atomized group.
Yeah, a big problem when starting new forums is breaking them into too many categories that eventually go stagnant. A lot of forums would do well just to start with a single, general category, which !chat basically is.
Yes I agree. You need to control community count relative to active user count. Besides special stuff you can look at a community on another federated instance.
It’s like walking into a party and announcing “I will only be friends with left-handed dental hygienists who are over 5 foot 8 and like sushi!” vs “Hello, everyone!”
Say, do you have an interest in ukulele, perchance? Maybe? Even slight? Sigh…
It's nice for sure. Even outside of Beehaw I believe that with the smaller overall user base of Lemmy, most communities should be more general until the user base gets much larger.
For example, staying on the topic of video games. There's a community for factory/automation games which is likely to stay more active than if Factorio, Satisfactory, and others each had their own community. Also, having a community for the subgenre means that small indie games that would normally rarely be discussed have a place.
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