I wonder why I haven’t seen any communities so far that link to related communities in the sidebar.
That was common in some subreddits, but it would be much more crucial for lemmy/kbin because of how bad communities can propagate sometimes.
Probably going back to customs of websites 20 years ago, who linked to each other to increase their visibility and ranking. I’ve also seen that on zeronet, where they included banners of other sites to increase their spread in the network.
The community I contribute to the most is the only one. The other same-name communities are dead (or only a couple old posts) and I posted a link to the one I use in the posts. Also, I browse on mobile most of the time, so I don’t see sidebars.
I didn’t mean communities with the same name on different instances, but active communities with related topics.
A bit of a stretch would be music genres linking to each other, open source games linking each other etc.
But more specifically closely related communities !ich_iel@feddit.de and !hessisch_iel@feddit.de (dialect variation of the former) or !me_irl@lemmy.ml, !ich_iel@feddit.de, !ik_ihe@feddit.nl, !eu_nvr@lemmy.eco.br and other translations linking each other. Or !minetest@lemmy.ml and !mineclone2@lemmy.world (game/mod of the former) linking each other.
Example screenshot with sidebar of r/meirl, which isn’t r/me_irl:
Should be done more for sure. It’s also the kind of self-organising that will be necessary to keep lemmy/kbin active and healthy. Users should maybe not be so shy about suggesting such links.
I do it with all my communities.
