This question may be moot but it’s something I’ve been thinking about. I’ve only recently jumped into this brave new world so you’ll have to forgive my ignorance.
I’m wondering if there’s any etiquette or conventions for which instance a ‘migrated’ subreddit should be hosted on. More specifically, I’m thinking about the communities where the subject matter is more regional.
For example, if I use an account on a UK-based instance because that’s local to me then it might not be optimal to create a community on the UK instance if the subject matter is US-centric. Would that ultimately lead to a worse experience for the majority of those community members that are based in North America?
The difference in speed for me connecting to something in the UK vs the US is basically negligible, but it’s non-zero and potentially exacerbated for those that have slower or unstable internet connections. This may be particularly true while rapidly-expanding instances are a bit unstable anyway.
It’s obviously up to the mods of each subreddit to decide what to do for their “official” migration. However, what I’m afraid of happening is:
- A migrated subreddit is hosted on an instance which has a detrimental effect on the experience of a significant number of its users.
- To combat this, former Reddit communities get splintered into multiple, region-based communities.
The latter wouldn’t be so bad but one of the things that made Reddit so appealing to me was the differences in perspective from all walks of life that sparked discussion. That sense of being part of a diverse, active community might be lost if the overall Reddit migration is handled in a haphazardly way.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Am I worrying about a non-issue?
Is it time to crack each other’s heads open and feast on the goo inside?
There’s a lot here I’d not considered so this is helpful, thanks.
The splintering is an issue I’ve run into already. When I searched for squaredcircle on the assumption the subreddit community had started moving, I got results for five ‘squaredcircle’ communities across five different instances and none of them have a significant membership. I don’t want to further splinter the community by creating another community as you say, so I figured I’d just have to subscribe to all of them and wait to see which one takes off. I guess it’s going to be down to the subreddit mods to say “this is where we’re going”, if that’s even what they want to do. Until then it might be a bit daunting for those making the jump but it is what it is.
Yeah, I blame Lemmy’s fairly terrible cross-instance community discovery and just being young. Reddit had overlapping communities as well (tons of DnD subreddits, tons of aiti subreddits, and there were plenty of high-profile community split events over mod policies). But because it was so well established in recent years… most communities had standardized on one well-run subreddit.
But Lemmy’s community search is so poor, I think folks legit fail to find bigger/better off-instance communities and so no single one gets a toe-hold to gain critical-mass… they all just kind of smoulder with catching fire. Hopefully better community discovery will come and the well-run communities start to rise to the top.
Were you a subreddit mod? In this case my advice would be to contact the existing mods of the lemmy communities / kbin magazines and see if one of them is willing to hand the community over to you (add you as mod, they step down). If so, you’ve found your new home!
(you may want to re-make your account on the instance that you’re primarily spending time on, for convenience, in case federation doesn’t work for several hours at a time here and there, etc)