I think you have to look at it from the point of view of people who are less technically skilled. The hurdle of Lemmy versus Reddit is greater anyway because the structure is more unfamiliar and complex.
And as a “new” platform you also have a chicken-and-egg situation that you have to overcome.
Imagine you don’t know Reddit and someone sends you a link to a subreddit for a topic that interests you.
You see many members and a lively exchange. This makes it interesting and you subscribe/follow it and in the best case participate.
Now imagine someone sends you a link to a Lemmy community for a topic that interests you.
Since the userbase is already much smaller, there will be much less going on there.
If you now also splitting things up, it will look even less alive than its really is.
And that makes it less attractive for most people and they leave.
If you had one big community instead of many smaller ones for a topic, the chance of faster growth would be higher.
As I said, always from the perspective of someone who is not clear about the concept and may not see that there is actually a much larger number of users for the topic.
I can understand why you like the concept, I’m not saying it’s bad in principle.
But in my option the most important thing for Lemmy is to quickly become attractive for a large number of people.
And since most users would rather join an already alive platform than build something from scratch, the last thing you want is to make things look smaller/less alive than they are.
I am honestly not sure why it seems to bug people so much to have multiple communities, but I’ve seen this brought up a bunch.
It existed on Reddit too, they just weren’t the exact names so it wasn’t as obvious.
If there are two communities for the topic you’re interested in, join them both! There’s no reason not to.
I think you have to look at it from the point of view of people who are less technically skilled. The hurdle of Lemmy versus Reddit is greater anyway because the structure is more unfamiliar and complex.
And as a “new” platform you also have a chicken-and-egg situation that you have to overcome.
Imagine you don’t know Reddit and someone sends you a link to a subreddit for a topic that interests you. You see many members and a lively exchange. This makes it interesting and you subscribe/follow it and in the best case participate.
Now imagine someone sends you a link to a Lemmy community for a topic that interests you. Since the userbase is already much smaller, there will be much less going on there. If you now also splitting things up, it will look even less alive than its really is. And that makes it less attractive for most people and they leave.
If you had one big community instead of many smaller ones for a topic, the chance of faster growth would be higher.
As I said, always from the perspective of someone who is not clear about the concept and may not see that there is actually a much larger number of users for the topic.
I can understand why you like the concept, I’m not saying it’s bad in principle. But in my option the most important thing for Lemmy is to quickly become attractive for a large number of people.
And since most users would rather join an already alive platform than build something from scratch, the last thing you want is to make things look smaller/less alive than they are.