I'm a big fan of this idea. In general, I think large, "big tent" communities are what Lemmy needs right now, since there's really nothing stopping anyone from spinning off more specific communities later should the volume of posts warrant it.
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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Recipes and Cooking Tips
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Welcome to !recipes, a place to share recipes and cooking tips of your own or those that you've found and loved. Share your favorite tips and meals.
Taken a nice photo of your creation? We highly encourage sharing with us and our friends over at !foodporn@lemmy.world.
Other Cooking Communities:
!cooking@lemmy.world - A general communty about all things cooking.
!foodporn@lemmy.world - Showcasing the best cooking creations.
!sousvide@lemmy.world - All about sous vide precision cooking.
!askculinary@lemmy.world - Have questions about cooking, ask away!
!koreanfood@lemmy.world - Celebrating Korean cuisine!
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Yep, this is the idea to get everyone to migrate to a larger, but more generic community. "Big tent" as you say. Then later on the more niche stuff can be opened again once there's enough users to support it.
Cooking, food, and recipes seem to fit well together in one community so I would agree. Maybe there can be a regular pinned askculinary post so the spirit of that community can be retained and questions can be funneled into one post?
Ah, I really like this idea. Thank you!
I think it's a very good idea, and I can't see any obvious disadvantages except, perhaps, the loss of posting and comment history from the currently existing communities.
Maybe also consider merging !foodporn@lemmy.world ? That one seems to be quite general too, and posts often become discussions of how to cook the showcased dish (plus I really dislike the name of the community).
I'd personally leave foodporn out. It's just pictures. I want recipes and discussion.
This is the plan. Foodporn is doing pretty good already with sub numbers and daily posts. Also like you said, that's for showing off pics anyway. SousVide and KoreanFood are staying out as well as they are pretty niche and don't really fit in with the more generic catch-all Food.
I can’t see any obvious disadvantages except, perhaps, the loss of posting and comment history from the currently existing communities.
So we can't actually merge the communities together. The existing communities would still exist, we would just be encouraging everyone to join a, hopefully larger and more active, main food community. The thing we're trying to decide now would be whether we lock the smaller communities and point everyone to the new main one or leave them all open and do some type of crossposting and encouraging everyone to join the new one.
We plan to leave FoodPorn as is, since it's doing pretty well with engagement and it's more about just sharing photos of nice looking dishes. We would encourage users if they have recipes, to post/crosspost them into the relevant community
I could see that! When I came here from reddit, I was looking to replace my old subreddits, your cooking, baking, recipes, cast iron, dutch oven, le creuset type stuff.
Even the non cooking stuff like comic books.
But it felt like I was the only one posting. :( It felt wrong monopolizing the conversation.
Combining to boost the users is a good idea.
This is what we are doing in some of the communities here now. Only a couple of people posting.
I like "recipes, then everything else". Having activity being "spread out" over too many communities is a problem because it looks like a ghost town, but there's a difference between a detailed recipe and most other cooking related posts/discussion. You can idly browse either or both, but if you're looking specifically for recipes, finding that will be much harder if they're not split out.
So one thing we're looking at is tagging posts with whatever the topic is. Something like [RECIPE] or [QUESTION]. That way they are easily labelled and searchable.
Speaking very generally about the idea of locking communities, it's useful to consider whether it's really your community to lock. You may have created it, and/or be listed as the 'owner', but - really - the admins of an instance have let you create a community, and are letting you be the mod of it.
If you lock it, and say "we're all moving to this other community", it's not unfeasible that a instance's admin may respond "mod demoted, community unlocked, new mods wanted", or that someone else may request ownership of the original community and it's then transferred to them.
So I'm in favour of a quality-over-quantity merging of communities, but - as mods - I think the most you can do is pin a post in the niche community, encouraging people to post or cross-post to the main one (It's better if the OP does the cross-posting - rather than it be automated - so it's them that get the replies in their inbox).
If you lock it, and say “we’re all moving to this other community”, it’s not unfeasible that a instance’s admin may respond “mod demoted, community unlocked, new mods wanted”, or that someone else may request ownership of the original community and it’s then transferred to them.
We're not just going rogue and doing whatever we want. We have been discussing this with the admins as well and have their blessing. There's a lot of behind the scenes communication you don't see. I can't speak to other communities, but I try my best to be more transparent than necessary and get the community's and admins input on every big decision or change to the community. You'll never see me just change things without being up front about it first. And in the spirit of transparency, locking was suggested by the admins.
I think the most you can do is pin a post in the niche community, encouraging people to post or cross-post to the main one (It’s better if the OP does the cross-posting - rather than it be automated - so it’s them that get the replies in their inbox).
This is what I would really like to do. The issue so far is, people aren't posting almost at all, much less cross-posting, despite the pinned post I put up encouraging it. Which is why we are looking at this merge, so we can widen the net of types of posts and hoping that gets more people to post in general. We're open to ideas so please let us know. Thanks for your feedback!