Usually the user numbers will start off really strong when a community is initially founded (especially if its a transplantation) and then drop off significantly in the following months. There’s typically a surge of posts which attracts users from /all and /new, but those users eventually filter out as the content slows down.

Yeah I mean that’s more or less what I assumed, not really major enough for me.

the people posting are free to go to another community whenever they want, and when they leave, the old community usually dies.

You’re not wrong and this has happened many times, also with c/anime leaving from lemmy.ml. But that doesn’t mean things will always go that way. The posters have a lot of power sure, but the casual users also have a lot more influence than you might think. Most people aren’t going to follow power posters to the ends of the earth, they’ll simply engage with the content that is most readily available to them, and they really don’t want to bother with splinter communities and moderation drama.

Damn, they really only have 200 weekly users? I knew they were small but I thought it would be at least a couple thousand. Federation is absolutely key, couldn’t agree more.

They used to have 915 users for the last 6 months on the old one, they just reached 937 for this month on the new one, so I guess most of the people interested moved.

!remindme to check their activity numbers 6 months from now and see how they compare. Hopefully it will be higher but I wouldn’t bet on it.

you can just announce that you are going to move, point to the new community, and then post the new content on the new community.

That’s the friction point. Most people aren’t as active as you are and tend to miss those kinds of announcements. Or they see an announcement and they scroll right past. That’s where you lose 90% of subscribers.

I wasn’t subscribed to the dbzer0 meme community, and I don’t expect it to replace the original one. Without knowing anything about what went down, I think y’all should just keep posting in the original community. But I will reluctantly subscribe for the time being, only because I greatly enjoy my LOTR memes and I don’t want to miss any good ones.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m just saying that it’s very disruptive and should only be done as a last resort, because many Lemmy communities are fragile as is, and we don’t have enough activity to fill the communities that already exist. Trying to break off communities and replace communities is a dangerous game, and shouldn’t be encouraged to solve minor problems, but only for major, unavoidable problems. People are going to do what they want no matter what I say, but that’s my advice.

The difficulty corresponds to the size and activity of the community. With all due respect, that’s an extremely small community, and they’ve still only gotten to around 20% of their original subscriber base. For more active communities, rebuilding the subscribers will be even more difficult. Luckily for us, most communities on Lemmy are relatively small, so transplantation can definitely be done for many of them.

However, when it comes to major communities, rebuilding the subscribers still isn’t enough, because you lose all of the post and comment history no matter what you do. Major communities (c/memes, c/greentext, c/news, even something like c/eurographicnovels) cannot be quickly rebuilt in such a manner, you inevitably have to start from scratch. They represent the combined effort and activity of many people over many months, in making quality posts, making quality comments, and upvoting and downvoting the content judiciously so that the cream rises to the top. You could recreate them and try to copy all the posts to the new community with a bot in a single day, but that would be a pale imitation of the actual community as it existed over a period of time, because everything would have 0 upvotes and 0 engagement.

Thanks for the reminder to resubscribe to the new c/sideoftheroad though.

What do you mean by easy export? I haven’t been keeping up with recent Lemmy updates because SJW is still running 0.19.5.

But if that’s some way to transfer your account to another server, that helps a little bit, but the more difficult thing is to migrate the communities to a new server. AFAIK you would have to start the communities from scratch with 0 posts and 0 subscribers, and that takes a long time to build back up.

But if the fediverse isn’t actually distributed, then you don’t actually have the option, right? If 80% of activity is on one server, then that server effectively controls the fediverse, and if you have a problem with their admins or moderators, you don’t have a viable alternative.

If it’s not actually distributed, the fact that it theoretically could be doesn’t really matter. And this isn’t even mentioning the possibility of a centralized server having technical or legal issues.

The divorce analogy is not a good one because that’s an individual decision, whereas migrating servers and communities is not something that one individual person can just suddenly choose to do. It requires time, effort, and collective action, so it’s better to be pre-emptively distributed to eliminate that vulnerability in the first place.