Hello again!

So we, the food and cooking community mods, have been discussing merging a few of the communities together. We’re pretty fractured at the moment and we don’t really have the userbase to support so many niche communities so we’re looking at merging some. We previously pinned a post asking users to cross-post to relevant communities and some of the feedback we received is some don’t like this as it can clutter their feeds. Also there were many suggestions of merging until we get more growth and can support more nice communities.

So the plan would be to merge !askculinary, !bbq, !cooking, !food, and !recipes. This would combine a lot of the more general food communities into one and hopefully we reduce cross posting as well as grow users and content. Later, if we have a larger userbase that can support more niche communities, we can spin them off again. So, before moving forward with the merge, we wanted to make sure you all are aware of the plans as well as get some feedback on this decision. So please let us know what you think. We look forward to hearing your thoughts! Thanks!

EDIT: To explain how this would work, we have a couple options:

  1. Lock all the niche communities and leave a pinned post pointing to the main Food community. Later we may reopen them once the userbase grows to support them.

  2. Leave all communities open and cross post from the niche communities to the main one. So when you post a recipe to !recpies@lemmy.world, it would get crossposted to !food@lemmy.world. !food@emmy.world would be a catch all if you wanted the “fire hose” approach. Or you can sub to the niche communities you want.

  • asterisk@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    8 months ago

    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).

    • Drusas@kbin.social
      4·
      8 months ago

      I’d personally leave foodporn out. It’s just pictures. I want recipes and discussion.

      • canthidium@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        3·
        8 months ago

        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.

    • canthidium@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      8 months ago

      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