Hi! I’m the admin over at fanaticus.social. We’re a sports-only instance. We already host some of the biggest baseball communities on lemmy.
I wanted to open a dialogue about consolidating our two communities into orioles@fanaticus.social. It seems we’ve duplicated some work on the game bots and have a lot of similar content.
I propose that the mods of this community migrate to the birds community on fanaticus and mod there instead and make this community private.
One benefit of focused instances (like fanaticus) is that we can sort of insulate ourselves from de-federation conflicts amongst the larger, user-focused instances. If anyone was around for the beehaw.org defederation from lemmy.world you know that one of the biggest instances can no longer interact with lemmy.world users. That includes any fellow orioles fans that might be left behind over there.
On fanaticus.social all we talk about is sports. It’s a non-controversial topic (most of the time) and because we’re focused on that one topic, we’re not likely to be defederated by anyone. Users from all the instances like beehaw, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, can still interact with and create content for their favorite teams and sports without worrying about losing access to the communities they’re a part of.
Now, I’m not trying to steal anyone’s communities or be an uber-mod or anything nefarious. I’m also not proposing anyone switch their home instance to fanaticus. What I’m saying is that I believe it would be best for the health of the sports communities, especially in their infancy, to separate themselves from the general instances where they risk defederation, and consolidate to a content-focused sports instance like fanaticus.
Let me know your thoughts!
You must log in or # to comment.
I agree that it would be best to have one main sub, and I’m perfectly happy to go wherever.
I think the problem now is that neither community is particularly large or active. 57 subscribers on lemmy.world vs. 16 on fanaticus. There’s really nothing going on yet, so it might be premature to have this discussion.
I’m subscribed to both forums, as are many others I’m sure. We could just let them run in parallel until… I don’t know when.
Your bot is better, though - at least for the moment 😉I’m subscribed to both and try to x-post to both of them. I would love to consolidate and would be happy to go with whichever is decided.
There are currently 54 subscribers to !orioles@fanaticus.social, 16 of which it sounds like are on lemmy.world (you will only see the number of subscribers from your local instance). I am the only subscriber from fanaticus to baltimore_orioles@lemmy.world.
For reference, combining the two communities (41 non-mutually exclusive ones from lemmy.world + 53 from fanaticus), would give a total of 94, which would rank it as the second highest team community on fanaticus (coincidentally just ahead of !nyyankees@fanaticus.social 😆). Nearly doubling the number of users to interact with on your favorite sports team’s community sounds like a win to me.
Also, I think it being early stages makes it the perfect time to have this discussion. Communities fragmented across instances are a big point of confusion and frankly, a turn off for new fediverse members. Especially those who aren’t technically savvy.
Communities fragmented across instances are a big point of confusion and frankly, a turn off for new fediverse members. Especially those who aren’t technically savvy.
Definitely. We’re in a phase now where only tech-savvy users are here but that should taper off.
What would consolidation look like? Just making lemmy.world/c/baltimore_orioles mod-only and putting up a sticky directing users to fanaticus?What would consolidation look like? Just making lemmy.world/c/baltimore_orioles mod-only and putting up a sticky directing users to fanaticus?
That is what I was imagining, yes. Additionally, the mods from lemmy.world/c/baltimore_orioles would be modded on fanaticus.social/c/orioles. If they want to, of course.
Maybe also you can join forces with us on our game bot 😉 but only because yours looks great and I know you’ll overtake us soon enough 😁
Maybe also you can join forces with us on our game bot
Is the code up online? I remember seeing one GDT bot somewhere that was an absolute industrial-scale monster, handling multiple sports and output to reddit, discord, etc. Mine is a toy in comparison. It’s mainly because I need a project and it’s good to show GitHub activity. I’m not sure how much to commit to it now.
No worries! Any contribution is welcome! There’s plenty of work to do, even small contributions are appreciated.
We forked the redball bots and are working with the maintainer to eventually create a PR back into his repo. You can find our fork here. There are bots for each sport but at least they’re separate. It’s got a GUI that allows you to configure each bot.
We’re discussing our dev on the lemmy channel of the redball discord.
redball
Yup - that’s the one. I’ll take a look and see if any of the open issues look tractable to me.
Just my 2 cents, I think having multiple communities is fine. What happens when an instance goes down? What whs it, Vlemmy?, that completely disappeared overnight? And just last night there were a number of instances exploited. And besides that, I think having multiple similar but not identical communities is a strength of the fediverse. I understand why others disagree, but that’s my thoughts on it.
What if we put up in the sidebar a link to and endorsement of your community? Let users do what they want. It was @AMillionMonkeys that made the bot and they are free to do with that as they wish. If your community grows rapidly, wonderful! I would be very happy if that happens!
Any other thoughts?
What happens when an instance goes down? What whs it, Vlemmy?, that completely disappeared overnight?
I think that’s a fair point that ought be addressed but may not be in the scope of this discussion. Redundancy and resiliency are separate issues that need to be handled by all lemmy admins. We have some work queued to ensure the stability of the servers. Additionally, I intend to set up a non profit or some other legal entity in order to accept donations to cover server costs and increase the bus factor.
And besides that, I think having multiple similar but not identical communities is a strength of the fediverse. I understand why others disagree, but that’s my thoughts on it.
Fair enough, everyone’s entitled to their own opinion. 🙂 I think these particular communities could arguably be called duplicates though as there isn’t really a difference in the topics or crowd discussing them as opposed to some other differentiation e.g. USA citizens vs French citizens discussing world politics. I understand your point of view though.
What if we put up in the sidebar a link to and endorsement of your community? Let users do what they want.
That sounds good to me. Does that mean you aren’t interested in joining the mod community of !orioles@fanaticus.social?
Just to be clear though, this isn’t my community as far as I see it. I’m just the admin. I have no interest in being a moderator of orioles or trying to push you out and I’m not trying to squat on these baseball communities. I only created them in order to build the game bots for them. I wanted to open this dialogue because I think it would be best for new users as lemmy continues to grow.
Any other thoughts?
Nope, that’s all 🙂
Side note: after I posted this I actually noticed that one of the communities I follow recently split from lemmy.world to a topic-based instance https://lemmy.world/c/android
That sounds good to me. Does that mean you aren’t interested in joining the mod community of !orioles@fanaticus.social?
If you need more mods, I’d be glad to help out. As a user, I’d be glad to peruse both communities.
I just don’t think killing this one is the way to go. If users all flock to yours and this one naturally dies, that’s fine though.
