Sibling communities: A middle way - sh.itjust.works

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/3508135 [https://sh.itjust.works/post/3508135] > There’s been an ongoing debate about whether communities should combine or stay separate. Both have significant disadvantages and advantages: > > # Combine: > > - Network effects. Smaller communities become viable if they pool together their userbase. Communities with more people (up to a point!) are generally more useful and fun. > - Discoverability. Right now, I might stumble on a 50 subscriber community and not realize everyone has abandoned it for the lively 500 subscriber community somewhere else, maybe with a totally different name. > > # Separate: > > - Redundancy. If a community goes down, or an instance is taken down, people can easily move over. > - Diffusion of political power. Users can choose a different community or instance if the current one doesn’t suit them. Mods are less likely to get drunk on power if they have real competition. > > This isn’t an exhaustive list, but I just want to show that each side has significant advantages over the other. > > # Sibling communities: > > To have some of the advantages of both approaches, how about we have official “sibling communities”? For example, sign up for [email protected] and, along the top, it lists [email protected] [[email protected]] as a sibling community. > > - When you post, you have an easily accessible option to cross-post automatically to all sibling communities. You can also set it so that only the main post allows comments, to aggregate all comments to just one post, if that’s desirable. > - The UI could detect sibling cross-posts and suppress multiple mentions of the same post if you’re subscribed to multiple sibling communities, maybe with a “cross-sibling post” designation. That way it only shows up once in your feed. > - Both mod teams must agree to become siblings, so it can’t be forced on any community. > - Mods of either community can also decide to suppress the cross post if they feel it’s too spammy or not suitable for cross discussion. > - This allows you to easily learn about all related communities without abandoning your current one. This increases the network effects without needing to combine or destroy communities. > > Of course, this could be more informal with just a norm to sticky a post at the top of every community to link to related communities. At least that way I know of the existence of other communities. I personally prefer the official designation so that various technologies can be implemented in the ways I mentioned.