Hello again!

So we, the food and cooking community mods, have been discussing merging a few of the communities together. We’re pretty fractured at the moment and we don’t really have the userbase to support so many niche communities so we’re looking at merging some. We previously pinned a post asking users to cross-post to relevant communities and some of the feedback we received is some don’t like this as it can clutter their feeds. Also there were many suggestions of merging until we get more growth and can support more nice communities.

So the plan would be to merge !askculinary, !bbq, !cooking, !food, and !recipes. This would combine a lot of the more general food communities into one and hopefully we reduce cross posting as well as grow users and content. Later, if we have a larger userbase that can support more niche communities, we can spin them off again. So, before moving forward with the merge, we wanted to make sure you all are aware of the plans as well as get some feedback on this decision. So please let us know what you think. We look forward to hearing your thoughts! Thanks!

EDIT: To explain how this would work, we have a couple options:

  1. Lock all the niche communities and leave a pinned post pointing to the main Food community. Later we may reopen them once the userbase grows to support them.

  2. Leave all communities open and cross post from the niche communities to the main one. So when you post a recipe to !recpies@lemmy.world, it would get crossposted to !food@lemmy.world. !food@emmy.world would be a catch all if you wanted the “fire hose” approach. Or you can sub to the niche communities you want.

  • CosmicSploogeDrizzle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I am for a merge. It worked well for my communities to merge (PlayStation and PS5) and I think it will be successful here also. I chose to keep my PS5 community open, but since you are dealing with merging multiple communities it might be good to lock them with a pinned post for at least a little while.

    Once the dust settles I think opening them back up (but keeping the pinned post) would be a good option to give the choice back to the community for those that eventually wish to splinter off.

    • canthidium@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Ah, I thought I remembered seeing some other communities merge in the past. So is that how you did it, pinned post encouraging everyone to move to the other community?

      • CosmicSploogeDrizzle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Yeah! I actually migrated from lemmy.ml/c/PS5 to Lemmy.world/c/PS5…and then eventually merged PS5 with Playstation when the PlayStation mods asked if I wanted to take over. PS5 was much more active at the time. You can still check out lemmy.world/c/ps5 to see my posts on how I did it.

        First I submitted a feedback post (like this one) then I submitted separate vote posts in each community to get consensus. In those vote threads I locked the post and had 2 comments, one for the merge and one against. I then had people upvote the comment corresponding to their wishes, either for or against (ignoring downvotes since some instances block downvotes)

        • canthidium@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Oh awesome, thanks so much for the help! That definitely seems like the best way to go about it. Much appreciated!