Any interest in consolidation with LW Hardware community?
Would there be an interest with consolidating with the !hardware@lemmy.world community?
This one has more subs, but a lot less engagement and it seems the mod for this community deleted their account?
No thank you. Consolidation is antithetical to how the fediverse works. I would rather just have a new active mod(s) in this community.
.world is run terribly, and is already very bloated, so no.
These things usually happens organically. Eventually one or two communities (with the same name) will be the only ones left.
And honestly, I believe if starting/moving a community, it’s better not to do it on the biggest servers.
I get it it's just that we have three hardware communities on different instances all with zero differentiation in terms of thematics.
I don't mind having multiple communities, but it's best when they offer a different angle on the same topic. Gaming vs. PC Gaming vs. Retrogaming. Specialized genre-focused communities and so on...
Given that LW is "too big" and can be a bit buggy at times, and ML is a general-purpose instance with an unmodded community, I'd argue that consolidation should be from LW and ML and towards programming.dev if anything. It's the right size, and it matches thematically. Usually, when people are proposing consolidation, it's away from LW, not towards it.
I've no strong opinion on the pros and cons of shutting down 'other communities' - I just collect similar communities in a Feed, and see all the posts that way: e.g. https://preferred.social/f/hardware - it's maybe better to wait until Lemmy implements a similar feature, to avoid the inevitable arguments.
No need. Multiple communities provide redundancy against instance failure, just like instances provide redundancy. If .world is dead tomorrow for whatever reason, even temporarily, I'd post an article here, or vice versa. People subscribed to both would see my post in either case. If I were more diligent, I'd even cross-post to both when both instances are up. Then none of my posts would be lost if one of the instances goes. Subscribing to multiple communities of the same name/type is the norm on Lemmy. There's no need for same-name communities to be unique, quite the opposite.
Programming.dev seems like a good option.
Since this is meta... however this ends up getting resolved could be a good template for consolidating multiple sparse communities across the Fediverse into a single, more populated one.