I feel like having many communities works well on large platforms, but on smaller ones it fragments the already limited content, which in turn makes most communities inactive and reduces engagement.
I feel like having many communities works well on large platforms, but on smaller ones it fragments the already limited content, which in turn makes most communities inactive and reduces engagement.
Uh, I think it’s the exact other way around. In practice most of the activity already is centralized in more general “melting pot” communities and the lack of engagement is the reason why the content is not distributed across the more specific communities.
Why is this situation not intentionally desirable (on paper)? Well, it kinda misses the whole point of the federation. Lemmy, despite decentralization, is currently more dependent on a few of its communities than the evil corpo social media. Then again, this just proves that technical centralization has always been a lesser issue with the traditional social media services and that activity is where activity is.
I still don’t like the idea of one big general community. I’m certain that a lot of the people here don’t want content just for the sake of content. Being forced to manually filter out most of the content would be a hot mess. On top of that, while activity might increase slightly in quantity, the quality would become even more superficial and shallow. For me personally, it’d be a reason to stop using Lemmy.