Ok, so here’s a situation I ran into, and thought of a solution for, but I’m not a programmer, so I don’t know if this is possible.

I live in Cleveland. Last I checked, we have a population of 300,00ish people. Might be closer to 350,000. Not the point.

As it stands, in general I’d say roughly 10% of general society uses reddit. Using rough numbers, that would mean 30,000ish people. I just checked, and /r/Cleveland has 151,000 subscribers, but only 58 users on the site at the moment I checked. That tells me there’s a lot of people subscribed to /r/Cleveland who no longer live in Cleveland.

I refuse to believe that of roughly 300,000 people, half are on /r/Cleveland. Especially if only 58 are online. So, maybe a lot of bots.

That being said Lemmy has probably less than 1% of society. And Cleveland has a finite number of potential users.

So when I look for the Cleveland sublemmy, I find three of them. Two I could join right away, the third is still pending because it seems the mod is the only user, and he hasn’t been active in months.

Point is, this city, even if there was only one Cleveland sub would still have a very small userbase. Now we’re dividing it among multiple communities all serving the same purpose. There’s only so much that happens in Cleveland. The majority of the reddit posts are “where should I eat? What should I do when I visit? Why do you guys have billboards of just eyes?”

There is NOT a lot going on here. And if we split these users up multiple times, you’ll have what we have now. Multiple dead communities, with a split userbase. So logically the first idea is “Well you only need one Cleveland community. The other one should close.” But that flies against the very foundation of what this place is built on.

So how do you integrate both communities userbases as one, without merging the subs? And that’s when it hit me.

Groups.

User groups, and sub groups. Lets start with sub groups.

So lets say I’m the head of Cleveland@instance1 and Fred runs Cleveland@instance2. We both see the userbase problem. So I send Fred a message, and ask if he wants to group up. He says yes. Now we’re grouped up. So what does that mean? It means that Joe, a Cleveland resident, could subscribe to Cleveland@instance2. It would then have some checkboxes that say “group Cleveland@instance1 and Cleveland@instance2?”

And for every checkbox you leave ticked, you’ll group those subs together. If you don’t want to group them, uncheck the boxes of the ones you don’t want to group.

So now Joe is subscribed to Cleveland@instance2. But because he’s grouped my Cleveland@instance one, everytime he posts, the comments and the up/downvotes for his comment will now be grouped together. So when he makes that post on Cleveland@instance2 it will show up on Cleveland@instance1 too. Anything in that post is technically being posted to Cleveland@instance2

So if you ARE subscribed to Cleveland@instance1 but NOT subscribed to Cleveland@instance2, then you wouldn’t even see the post in Cleveland@instance1. You’re only seeing it, and able to interact with it from Cleveland@instance1 because they’re both officially grouped, and you agreed to the grouping on your end when you subscribed.

You could, in theory reject the grouping when you subscribe, and then subscribe to the second one seperately. Which would keep everything seperate and as it is now. I don’t know who would want to do that, but it would be possible.

Now, for the user groups.

Pretty much the same concept, but on an individual basis. So, lets say I subscribe to videogames@instance and I also subscribe to gamers@instance. Those communities have NOT grouped for whatever reason, so YOU group them for yourself.

So now when you post, you’ll post once, and it will post your new post once in videogames@instance and once in gamers@instance.

So now you posted two seperate posts, but because you grouped them on an individual basis, you’ll see all the upvotes and replies in one post in your inbox on your end. In reality there are two seperate posts, but your interaction with it feels as one.

  • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
    42·
    5 months ago

    Yes, it’s completely possible.

    Kbin has it, which it calls “Collections” - see https://kbin.social/magazines/collections. Anyone can add a collection which can be subscribed to by anyone. It is very flexible and crowd-sources the work of organizing the communities into collections. I like it.

    PieFed calls it “Topics” - see https://piefed.social/topics. They are arraigned into a hierarchy and are created by the the instance admin. This could give a better experience to the end user but puts more work onto the instance admins.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      24·
      5 months ago

      So basically I had a great idea, all on my own, maybe a bit rough around the edges…but it’s not only been thought of before, but alao implemented, multiple times, and smoothed out the rough edges to make it work.

      Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool.

      Hey, imagine if we had boxes that weighed 2000 pounds. With wheels. And pushed forward using motors. Using some kind of fuel to run the motors…I know, I know, you’d need a steady supply of this fuel. But we could open up a fuel delivery subscription!!! And we could call this box of transportation a “go go machine”!

      Yeah, that’s the ticket.

      • Nutteman@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        5 months ago

        That last idea sounds like a nightmare. It’s a good thing we didn’t design all our cities in the US around every citizen having them hahahahahahahahahshAHAHAHAHAHA

  • DrGiltspur@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    5 months ago

    Reddit had something similar with ‘multireddits’. It was basically just a way to group multiple subreddits together. You could either create a multireddit for your own use or you could share it for others to use also.

    For posting you would still have to post to a particular subreddit. But for reading you could easily view all the posts for the group.

    Right now, you can only view Lemmy as ‘Local’, "All’ or "Subscribed’. It would be nice if I could have more control over that, and view for example ‘all the movies and tv communities’.

    I think this is especially true since right now it tends to be the case that the high traffic communities tend to drown out the smaller once. If I look at my Subscribed feed, it is dominated by a handful of communities (News, WorldNews, etc.) since they are getting the most posts and comments.

  • AlligatorBlizzard@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    10·
    5 months ago

    I think your tech suggestion is neat. I think your hope of a thriving Cleveland community on Lemmy is a bit too ambitious at the moment. I’m slightly active in the Minnesota and Twin Cities communities on here, but… they’re pretty quiet communities. The problem you run into is that most users on social media sites like this don’t post. Or they only comment. You need enough people to post so it’s not just one or two people feeling like they’re yelling into a void. The Twin Cities may be slightly smaller than Cleveland, but we’re actually interesting, lol.

  • jeffw@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    5 months ago

    Cleveland has a population of 360k. The metro area is apparently closer to 4 million.

    Just putting that out there

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      5·
      5 months ago

      If by “the metro area” you mean what we call “the greater cleveland area”, then…maybe? That still seems high, since Ohio fluctuates between 10-12 million statewide, and of the 3 big cities, we’ve shrunk to the smallest. Cincinnati has the most, Columbus is second with an astrict. That astrict being that every year Columbus gains and loses massive population numbers, as they’re mostly a college town of students going to OU.

      Still though, the greater Cleveland goes halfway to akron, and I’ve heard people as far west as Elyria claim to be from Cleveland, until you press them to specify where.

      • jeffw@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        5 months ago

        So I double checked… Cleveland metro is 2.1 million but that is a subset of a statistical area called “Cleveland-Akron-Canton” which is almost 4 million

  • vinayagg@api.clubsall.comEnglish
    8·
    5 months ago

    We just finished building https://clubsall.com, we implemented this, we call them clubs.

    e.g. when you subscribe to “technology” club, you get content from multiple “technology” communities. You can also post a message and tag multiple clubs.
    The main difference seems to be that we have pre-defined clubs that aggregate communities.

    In your case, seems like every user can create their own groups. Honestly, intriguing idea.

  • can@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    6·
    5 months ago

    That being said Lemmy has probably less than 1% of society. And Cleveland has a finite number of potential users.

    Probably

    Pretty much the same concept, but on an individual basis. So, lets say I subscribe to videogames@instance and I also subscribe to gamers@instance. Those communities have NOT grouped for whatever reason, so YOU group them for yourself.

    So now when you post, you’ll post once, and it will post your new post once in videogames@instance and once in gamers@instance.

    I see where you’re coming from, but the problem is instances and communities (not “sublemmies”) have different moderation styles and focuses, and this would just muddy things up unless it’s very specific and deliberate.