Fediverse

I agree! If you DM the mods or make a meta post, I feel like they'd happily add a section. Sometimes they aren't aware of the other communities

If Lemmy automatically generated a list of related communities then mods wouldn't need to manually maintain a list.

Nah, this can lead to having many sparsely populated communities. It can discourage new users, and fediverse adoption generally.

For example, if you look in one of the several audiobooks communities you would conclude that the fediverse is a ghost town. However, the actual "community" is in /c/books. If you post about audiobooks in both you won't get any engagement in the audiobooks communities.

After the great reddit API influx a few years ago a bunch of communities sprang up but were quickly abandoned, contributing to this problem.

There's actually a community discussing these dead communities and how to go about merging / closing the dead ones, but I can't remember what its called.

Of course in some cases with larger communities it might make sense to split communities into different topics, but there's very few communities large enough for that to be genuinely warranted.

sidebars need a lot of love. No one should really be making a community until they are ready to explain what their community is about and not only link to other communities using the proper linking for federation but also wikis and resources and such. I appreciate people running communities but if little effort is going to be put in I rather just not have the community. Now granted some communities do a decent job with the sidebar but its certainly not the norm in the fediverse.

One thing what i miss from Reddit is that user recommending related subreddits or suggesting subreddits where the post would fit in.

I see this in the fediverse sometimes but it is much rarer.

I disagree, in my experience this tended to lead to the whole. "This interpretation of our niche is better suited for our sister subreddit so your post has been removed"

Way ahead on this heh. Did this a while back on our communities. Piefed batching of cross posts helps a bit with discovery. And this should as well.

I would love to see some more artistic and visible appreciation for related communities in the sidebars. Something like the old webring / affiliate banners that websites had in the '90s (88x31 IIRC), even!