I often browse /all, come across a post that looks interesting but I have no clue what's it about, so I check the sidebar - and all I find is "An unofficial Lemmy community for X", " A place to discuss everything about X", or the best kind, "A continuation of r/X from Reddit".

Can't people write just some basics? What is that thing, a TV show, a music band, a sports team, a tabletop game? Sometimes I really can't tell even after looking at a few posts.

Your community may be of interest to someone who stumbles upon it, not only to diehard fans.

I know sometimes that's the joke, but most times it would be simple to just use a few words. "Discuss X, a Zimbabwean spy-thriller public theatre show." There we go, now everyone knows what it is.

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[–] fubo@lemmy.world 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Way back on Olde Usenet in the 1990s, there was a whole voting process for creating new forums ("newsgroups"), where you had to get supporters to say they would actually use your new forum if you created it. Creating the new forum soc.women.lesbian-and-bi required a whole democratic voting process, and it passed!

soc.women.lesbian-and-bi is a moderated newsgroup which passed its vote for creation by 458:56 as reported in news.announce.newgroups on 14 Aug 1995.

Alternately, you could create your new forum in the alt space, where you just had to have an argument in alt.config about creating the new forum.

Either way, the theory was that real news servers would only carry your forum if you won a vote and/or argument about it. The point of this was, supposedly, that cluttering-up the list of forums with a bunch that nobody was using would be a bad idea, so it would be valuable to show that people wanted a forum before creating it.

In practice, this depended on the ability & interest of news server admins to follow the democratic and/or anarchic processes for the creation of new groups.

[–] BD1sHappyFeet@lemm.ee 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I remember when rec.arts.disney split. There was the voting process whether to split as well as a vote to how it would split, if I remember correctly. I hadn't thought about that in years.

Alt was the free for all. I learned a lot on alt.atheism, including how threads devolve into chaos and when to walk away.

Thanks fubo, I feel super old now.

[–] fubo@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Hah! Better to learn from alt.callahans than alt.religion.scientology ...

[–] fuzzybee@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

Who could forget alt.buddha.short.fat.guy and alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork?