2y ago

I wish people would write some descriptions for their communities

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.

55 comments

Some communities have pinned posts that explain their community in more detail, but I generally agree with you.
- Cheers to that username.
  
  not sure which I like more, the squares or @fucker
- Your avatar gave me a seizure and I died.
- That avatar really isn't cool for people with sensitivity to flashing images, please don't do that.
- Your profile is hilarious 😂
- 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.
  
  Hah! Better to learn from alt.callahans than alt.religion.scientology ...
- Who could forget alt.buddha.short.fat.guy and alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork?

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
  !skeptic@lemmy.world
  !debunkthis@lemmy.world
  
  This is super helpful, thank you very much.
- 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.
  
  It was actually easy to create it (I’m on lemm.ee instance) the hard part is I think just being able to maintain engagement.

Rules included would be good too. I don't know if I can post external links or discussion sometimes.
- We do include rules in the lemdro.id communities. Unfortunately, many don't read the sidebar.
- Everything which is not forbidden is allowed

I agree. If they can't take the time to write anything in the sidebar or have a community image, I lose interest pretty quickly.

I was messing up with my community, added the description pretty early, just completed the whole shebang with rules, game season info, links,...
Yes, it's a continuation attampt of the reddit variant, as it looks like the other mods have left that sub as well. I'm still there, lurking, but it's dying after a vote to stay. The main contributers went silent there and moved to the community discord server.

I'm doing my best! This is my first time modding, and I'm not sure how to run a good community. Feel free to stop by any of my communities and suggest better sidebar content and I promise I'll update it.
- I wouldn't know what "OL Reign" is, maybe you could add what sport that is. Altho I guess "FC" kinda gives it away.
  But sports team is something I have no interest in so I'm adding these to my huuuuuuge block list of everything sports-related. Don't take it personally :p
  Btw I'm also trying to get people to use the fanaticus.social instance that's apparently dedicated to sports. Or the country instances.

You might be able to make a [Meta] post in said community and ask for the sidebar to be expanded. Who knows, maybe it’ll work.
- I've commented to a couple where e.g. there was a sticky of the mod asking what people want (but still no description), but sometimes I'm lazy and just want to browse :p

c/menopause is pretty much self-explantory
- Exactly, clearly that’s a subreddit designed for cavemen to discuss their disdain for temporarily halting their music and videos. Me No Pause!
- just like !trees@lemmy.world is...
  
  Tbh, I'm surprised that community is about trees. I was expecting an r/marijuanaenthusiasts situation.

Yeah its really weird. Instead they leave the default info about the server its on.

Those ones with words that i don't recognize - i usually assume it's a video game.
- I usually assume it's an anime.

I'm pretty confident if people expect you to participate in their community they either want you to already know about it, or learn about it through osmosis by not telling you the insular gatekeeped references.
If it's something you should know and you're either young or just one of those rare things you've never encountered... You're on the internet dude. Use Google lol.
- Fuck that I'ma just keep scrolling. If they want their community to grow they should at least put in the minimum effort of a description.

The community may be of interest to non-diehard fans but did you ever consider that you are of no interest to the community?

55 comments