For the unaware, is a alternative to platforms such as Reddit and Tildes.
I've been using Lemmy as one of my main social platforms for the past 6 months...
About #1 (merging communities): to a certain extent users already do this. Nothing stops you from locking !pancakes@a.com with a pinned thread like “go to !pancakes@b.com”.
If you aren’t already the moderator of n-1 communities on a multitude of instances, there are some pretty significant challenges:
Find all the communities on a given topic (easy)
Convince people that consolidation is a good idea (difficult)
Get people, many of whom are reluctant to see a community on their home instance locked, to decide on a which community to switch to (sometimes impossible)
Contact the moderators (or the admins, if the mods are inactive) of each of the n-1 communities and get them to lock each community, with appropriate links to the decided upon community (tedious)
It’s a right pain-in-the-ass to do properly, and I’ve had many more failures than I’ve had successes.
If you aren’t already the moderator of
n-1communities on a multitude of instances, there are some pretty significant challenges:n-1communities and get them to lock each community, with appropriate links to the decided upon community (tedious)It’s a right pain-in-the-ass to do properly, and I’ve had many more failures than I’ve had successes.
Same experience here