I often browse /all, come across a post that looks interesting but I have no clue what’s it about, so I check the sidebar - and all I find is “An unofficial Lemmy community for X”, " A place to discuss everything about X", or the best kind, “A continuation of r/X from Reddit”.
Can’t people write just some basics? What is that thing, a TV show, a music band, a sports team, a tabletop game? Sometimes I really can’t tell even after looking at a few posts.
Your community may be of interest to someone who stumbles upon it, not only to diehard fans.
I know sometimes that’s the joke, but most times it would be simple to just use a few words. “Discuss X, a Zimbabwean spy-thriller public theatre show.” There we go, now everyone knows what it is.
Some communities have pinned posts that explain their community in more detail, but I generally agree with you.
That’s what we did at !japaneselanguage@sopuli.xyz
Which is honestly not a spin-off of r/japaneselanguage because that subreddit was a complete mess. But so was r/learnjapanese. I don’t get the optics of a Reddit spin-off because that’s like tying your community to the expectations and behaviour of a previously community that could will be improved upon.
This was a problem on reddit too, and it looks like it’s carried over here. People make new communities and just assume that everyone in the future who finds it will just automatically know the purpose.
Way back on Olde Usenet in the 1990s, there was a whole voting process for creating new forums (“newsgroups”), where you had to get supporters to say they would actually use your new forum if you created it. Creating the new forum soc.women.lesbian-and-bi required a whole democratic voting process, and it passed!
soc.women.lesbian-and-bi is a moderated newsgroup which passed its vote for creation by 458:56 as reported in news.announce.newgroups on 14 Aug 1995.
Alternately, you could create your new forum in the alt space, where you just had to have an argument in alt.config about creating the new forum.
Either way, the theory was that real news servers would only carry your forum if you won a vote and/or argument about it. The point of this was, supposedly, that cluttering-up the list of forums with a bunch that nobody was using would be a bad idea, so it would be valuable to show that people wanted a forum before creating it.
In practice, this depended on the ability & interest of news server admins to follow the democratic and/or anarchic processes for the creation of new groups.
I remember when rec.arts.disney split. There was the voting process whether to split as well as a vote to how it would split, if I remember correctly. I hadn’t thought about that in years.
Alt was the free for all. I learned a lot on alt.atheism, including how threads devolve into chaos and when to walk away.
Thanks fubo, I feel super old now.
Agreed! I started a community a couple days ago and I also browsed through the descriptions of other communities to get an idea of what we should put in one (I have no experience moderating subreddits or anything like that) and I found that many had little to nothing in the sidebar.
In case this is of any use to you or others, here’s what I’ve found to work well:
- Summary of what the community is about
- Community rules of conduct
- Links to related communities that offer similar content
- Some additional info/useful links that are related to the topic.
Good formatting also makes it look clean and professional.
Shameless plug: check these out
Did you have to do anything special to start one? I just tried and I keep getting an error: {“error”:“rate_limit_error”} when I hit create.
Rules included would be good too. I don’t know if I can post external links or discussion sometimes.
