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:

  1. 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.

  2. Leave all communities open and cross post from the niche communities to the main one. So when you post a recipe to [email protected], it would get crossposted to [email protected]. [email protected] would be a catch all if you wanted the “fire hose” approach. Or you can sub to the niche communities you want.

  • freamonEnglish
    31·
    8 months ago

    Speaking very generally about the idea of locking communities, it’s useful to consider whether it’s really your community to lock. You may have created it, and/or be listed as the ‘owner’, but - really - the admins of an instance have let you create a community, and are letting you be the mod of it.

    If you lock it, and say “we’re all moving to this other community”, it’s not unfeasible that a instance’s admin may respond “mod demoted, community unlocked, new mods wanted”, or that someone else may request ownership of the original community and it’s then transferred to them.

    So I’m in favour of a quality-over-quantity merging of communities, but - as mods - I think the most you can do is pin a post in the niche community, encouraging people to post or cross-post to the main one (It’s better if the OP does the cross-posting - rather than it be automated - so it’s them that get the replies in their inbox).

    • canthidium@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      4·
      8 months ago

      If you lock it, and say “we’re all moving to this other community”, it’s not unfeasible that a instance’s admin may respond “mod demoted, community unlocked, new mods wanted”, or that someone else may request ownership of the original community and it’s then transferred to them.

      We’re not just going rogue and doing whatever we want. We have been discussing this with the admins as well and have their blessing. There’s a lot of behind the scenes communication you don’t see. I can’t speak to other communities, but I try my best to be more transparent than necessary and get the community’s and admins input on every big decision or change to the community. You’ll never see me just change things without being up front about it first. And in the spirit of transparency, locking was suggested by the admins.

      I think the most you can do is pin a post in the niche community, encouraging people to post or cross-post to the main one (It’s better if the OP does the cross-posting - rather than it be automated - so it’s them that get the replies in their inbox).

      This is what I would really like to do. The issue so far is, people aren’t posting almost at all, much less cross-posting, despite the pinned post I put up encouraging it. Which is why we are looking at this merge, so we can widen the net of types of posts and hoping that gets more people to post in general. We’re open to ideas so please let us know. Thanks for your feedback!