Similar small Lemmy communities need to merge to survive.

Agree, in the great reddit migration everyone came over and just created communities for everything. Now that the dust has settled we have hundreds of one person communities and so many similar ones.

Personally I'd like to see the admins go through their communities and say if there is only one member or if the only mods have been dormant to lock the communities and pin a post saying the community is up for adoption. At the very least that'd stop some of the hemorrhaging

We not only desperately need "multilemmys," the implementation needs to go further than R*ddit did by making them public and maybe even by automatically creating ones for communities in different instances with the same name by default (but allowing mods to opt out).

I know you mean well op, but you are asking for people to make /another/ dead community. the communities didn't work out. most won't. it's okay, that's true on reddit too. essentially:

eventually, if there is a community big enough to survive, it'll find a home just fine.

I see your point, and I agree that it would be nicer to just have to follow one community instead of a million smaller ones. There's always cross-posting. When you make a post and there are several communities for the same thing, post on the smallest one and then cross post it on the other ones.

Each community has a reason to exist, maybe different rules and different moderators. It's up to them to arrange a merge or the admins to archive inactive communities.

Video games are another big one.

I always favor !games@sh.itjust.works rather than !games@lemmy.world, but I know some people think the opposite.

At the moment, it's mostly a debate between people wanting to centralize content on LW, and people who prefer it on another well-known instance.

I'm guilty of that with !moviesandtv@lemm.ee and !movies@lemmy.world.

But to be fair, games and movies and general interest, all the communities seem to be doing well, even if split.

So what you're saying is all these communities should centralise into one big community

I'm not so worried about something like !backpacking and !hiking; there's a lot of overlap but those aren't identical activities.

I'm thinking more about the issue of having !hiking!hiking@lemmy.ml , !hiking@sh.itjust.works, !hiking@lemmy.world, etc. Though I think there are already emerging de facto standard homes for these things, where there's one that actually has any activity, and then ten with one member and no content, which eventually just need to disappear.

I had a quick look at the 3 you quoted, and they all seem equally dead, with all the mods either missing or even banned.

If you are interested in reviving it, feel free to select one, request its moderation to the admins of that instance, then post on all of the others to let people know that you are reviving the other.

!cooking@lemmy.world had a similar discussion a few weeks back when they noticed they were spread too thin, with !recipes@lemmy.world for instance. You can see now that !recipe is locked, and has a pinned post to redirect to !cooking

Agreed; that does seem like an issue right now. For example, I like watches. And while there is - A - watches community, there’s also niches for expensive, affordable, mechanical, vintage, etc. We’re really not at the level of content where it makes sense to fragment it that much. I’d rather see all those posts rolled into one community until you reach enough of them to justify the split.

I’ll be doing my part to generate some content, but it’ll take a concerted effort to grow things.