this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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I don't know. This is all new to me (and thank you for engaging with me and helping to educate), so I don't know what will incentivize or discourage people from shifting between communities, but based on what little I know, I don't see why they wouldn't since there is very little friction to doing so.
Your subreddit analogy feels very apt, actually. r/pics2 might be a graveyard, but I can think of two instances where part or most of a community moved to an alternate version of the subreddit, largely because they didn't like the moderation.
Go to r/Cubs, created September of 2008. It's got a reasonably healthy 28k subs, but the posts and comments are pretty lackluster and gamethreads are graveyards. Contrasted to r/ChiCubs, which was created 7 years later and has nearly 3x as many subs and is a much more active community - essentially this is the subreddit for Cubs baseball fans on reddit.
Very similar story in r/publicFreakout and r/Actualpublicfreakouts, the latter of which splintered off from the former on largely idealogical grounds.
Many people move between them, some people participate in both, and perhaps one day one of them will "win" if the other withers away.
It seems to me a similar dynamic could play out across instances of the same subreddit name if some old reddit power mods come and squat on communities before they are fully formed. To use a fake example, [email protected] vs [email protected]