Consolidation of electric vehicle communities on Lemmy?
Why consolidate communities?
One of the advantages of a decentralized platform like Lemmy is the ability to create parallel communities on the same topic. "You don't like how a community is being moderated? Go to another instance and start a new community!" (with or without blackjack and hookers)
However, this is also a double-edged sword. The creation of multiple communities on the same (or similar) topics can also fragment the userbase, leading to very sparsely populated communities.
I sometimes think that unmoderated communities should be closed, and just be left and locked with a pointer to the active one. In case an issue arises with the active one, they can still be unlocked and used as back up.
Consolidating electric vehicle communities
Applying these principles to the EV communities on Lemmy, let's take an overview of what currently exists:
Do all of these communities serve a distinct purpose? If not, could we consolidate some of them?
While Lemmy does not currently have a built-in way of moving or merging communities, @[email protected] has had some success with pinning an explanation post directing users to the new community and locking the old one. Is this something which could be applied to the EV communities on Lemmy?
The next question is, of course "Which communities should we consolidate to?"
Given the general sentiment to move off of ML (for ideological reasons) and off of World (to avoid centralization of instances), my proposal would be [email protected]. I think the SolarPunk instance is a nice match for an EV community, but I am interested to hear what others think.
Definitely encouraging! Although I think active users/week and users/month is a more meaningful metric than total subscribers. Many of the subscribers on the larger instances are remnants of the 2023 APIcalypse, and not active accounts.