cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/7214793
Hello again!
So we, the food and cooking community mods, have been discussing merging a few of the communities together. We’re pretty fractured at the moment and we don’t really have the userbase to support so many niche communities so we’re looking at merging some. We previously pinned a post asking users to cross-post to relevant communities and some of the feedback we received is some don’t like this as it can clutter their feeds. Also there were many suggestions of merging until we get more growth and can support more nice communities.
So the plan would be to merge !askculinary, !bbq, !cooking, !food, and !recipes. This would combine a lot of the more general food communities into one and hopefully we reduce cross posting as well as grow users and content. Later, if we have a larger userbase that can support more niche communities, we can spin them off again. So, before moving forward with the merge, we wanted to make sure you all are aware of the plans as well as get some feedback on this decision. So please let us know what you think. We look forward to hearing your thoughts! Thanks!
EDIT: To explain how this would work, we have a couple options:
Lock all the niche communities and leave a pinned post pointing to the main Food community. Later we may reopen them once the userbase grows to support them.
Leave all communities open and cross post from the niche communities to the main one. So when you post a recipe to !recpies@lemmy.world, it would get crossposted to !food@lemmy.world. !food@emmy.world would be a catch all if you wanted the “fire hose” approach. Or you can sub to the niche communities you want.
When the rush happened from redditors joining Lemmy, they basically went and remade every single subreddit, not once on a single instance, but many many times over many instances. This is a problem, because now we have a ton of dead spaces across the federation that are useless.
I am for merging, because the userbase is too small to sustain multiple niche communities. Lock 'em up, boys!
Thank you for your comment.
This is exactly the reason why we’re exploring these options. We’re still somewhat trying find out how we want grow and form the cooking communities as a whole hence why we’re asking for community feedback.
It’ll grow over time as the Lemmy userbase grows. It’s not like people are cooking less, if anything we’re cooking more given the amount of knowledge available on the internet allowing us to do crazy creations we never thought of ourselves.
Since the pandemic I’ve gotten a lot more into cooking and baking, and it’s mostly with the help of guides and stuff from the internet.
I would make it mandatory to share the recipe, personally. That’s my growth driver; providing value.
This is true, but what we’re seeing is lack of content which doesn’t entice people to sub and slows down growth. The idea is that if we can get more people posting and more content, more people will want to sub and then hopefully more people will post and we can get to a point where all the communities can serve their own niches and thrive.