@snowe@programming.dev what do you think of this idea?

Okay, well if you are confident it's working, then great. Presumably then, you don't see that there are any issues with over-dilution?

This is such a lovely idea. I look forward to joining this.

May I ask, why do you think that is the better option? I understand people didn't boost things when they were requesting communities, but are they boosting now?

I'm not certain that cross-posting a bunch of stuff and dumping project newsfeeds into communities is going to kickstart them much. I don't think that can work with you doing it alone across so many communities. You need someone who is really keen on growing the community to be doing it, and if that someone isn't around - I'd argue the community may not need to exist (until someone does arrive and wants to do that).

Again, this is your instance and it's not my business how you run it, so feel free to tell me to mind my own business.

I understand. Do you think that making 100 communities "to start collecting people" is a bit counterintuitive, though? Just a quick browse through shows that the majority of these coms (including ones made much longer ago) are just dead. A lot of them have moderators that haven't shown signs of activities in months, and the only posts are the RSS style feed dumps, with little sign of discussion. Would it not make more sense to just let people make communities who are interested in actually running the community? Including starting discussions, advertising the community, sharing interesting content within it, etc.

Please don't take that as a criticism. I see that you do a lot around here, and I really appreciate your efforts. I'm just concerned that this mass dilution may hinder a lot more than it helps.

Even looking at some of the larger coms, like !gamedev@programming.dev, haven't had activity in over 10 days. In my opinion, that makes it feel unappealing as a place to go and discuss and share things about that topic.

The 5-6 posts per hour I mentioned is a little disingenuous, too. Looking through it, half of those are a single user (Mac), who is just going through these empty communities and posting links to the project's news feed.

Do you not think there would be some merit in having fewer, but more condensed and livelier communities?

I may well be wrong, I am certainly no expert in creating or running something like this. I am just drawing from the experience I've seen of places like old Reddit (back when it started) growing. They didn't let anyone make subs until around two years in, at which point they had reached a critical mass of users that meant fracturing into subreddits didn't leave the whole site feeling thin.