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:
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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.
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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.
I’m a big fan of this idea. In general, I think large, “big tent” communities are what Lemmy needs right now, since there’s really nothing stopping anyone from spinning off more specific communities later should the volume of posts warrant it.
Yep, this is the idea to get everyone to migrate to a larger, but more generic community. “Big tent” as you say. Then later on the more niche stuff can be opened again once there’s enough users to support it.
Cooking, food, and recipes seem to fit well together in one community so I would agree. Maybe there can be a regular pinned askculinary post so the spirit of that community can be retained and questions can be funneled into one post?
Ah, I really like this idea. Thank you!
I think it’s a very good idea, and I can’t see any obvious disadvantages except, perhaps, the loss of posting and comment history from the currently existing communities.
Maybe also consider merging [email protected] ? That one seems to be quite general too, and posts often become discussions of how to cook the showcased dish (plus I really dislike the name of the community).
I’d personally leave foodporn out. It’s just pictures. I want recipes and discussion.
This is the plan. Foodporn is doing pretty good already with sub numbers and daily posts. Also like you said, that’s for showing off pics anyway. SousVide and KoreanFood are staying out as well as they are pretty niche and don’t really fit in with the more generic catch-all Food.
I can’t see any obvious disadvantages except, perhaps, the loss of posting and comment history from the currently existing communities.
So we can’t actually merge the communities together. The existing communities would still exist, we would just be encouraging everyone to join a, hopefully larger and more active, main food community. The thing we’re trying to decide now would be whether we lock the smaller communities and point everyone to the new main one or leave them all open and do some type of crossposting and encouraging everyone to join the new one.
We plan to leave FoodPorn as is, since it’s doing pretty well with engagement and it’s more about just sharing photos of nice looking dishes. We would encourage users if they have recipes, to post/crosspost them into the relevant community
I could see that! When I came here from reddit, I was looking to replace my old subreddits, your cooking, baking, recipes, cast iron, dutch oven, le creuset type stuff.
Even the non cooking stuff like comic books.
But it felt like I was the only one posting. :( It felt wrong monopolizing the conversation.
Combining to boost the users is a good idea.
This is what we are doing in some of the communities here now. Only a couple of people posting.
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Why Food though? Last post was 2 months ago and was low effort garbage (not OC, a link about American breakfast cereal). Why not Cooking or Recipes instead?
The past posts don’t matter. Food would just be the better catch all community name for everything food related. Recipes would exclude questions, cooking tips, or other more generic topics. Once people sub, in theory, it should have more users than all the other food communities. And posts will come.
Unpopular opinion I guess but I would rather have separate dedicated subs and wait for them to grow. Easy enough to subscribe to each.
That’s why we’re looking at keeping them open and setting up !food to be a catch-all. I just don’t want to clutter everyone’s feeds with constant cross posts. So trying to figure out exactly how we would want to do that.
Also, the problem we’re seeing is the separate communities aren’t really growing. Look at this community, for example. Almost every post is me or u/TheGiantKorean. People comment, but we’re gonna need more people to post content for people to want to sub and grow. So the idea of having a big catch-all community is accepting a wider variety of post types, we can have more people posting.
I like “recipes, then everything else”. Having activity being “spread out” over too many communities is a problem because it looks like a ghost town, but there’s a difference between a detailed recipe and most other cooking related posts/discussion. You can idly browse either or both, but if you’re looking specifically for recipes, finding that will be much harder if they’re not split out.
So one thing we’re looking at is tagging posts with whatever the topic is. Something like [RECIPE] or [QUESTION]. That way they are easily labelled and searchable.
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).
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!
