In the past few weeks the !canada@lemmy.ca community has grown quite a bit. The growth has mostly consisted of news and (geo)political posts, which is understandable.
However, this makes it hard to follow any text threads like these or non-news/political posts. This leaves the only option of either blocking the !canada@lemmy.ca community completely, or having to use a mobile app with keyword filtering (I’m not aware of any on desktop, and keyword filters do not sync between devices yet).
I’d suggest changing/updating the rules of !canada@lemmy.ca to note to users to post their political (and geopolitical?) news threads in !canadapolitics@lemmy.ca instead. Alternatively, split geopolitical with (world) news into a separate lemmy.ca (world)news community like with !worldnews@aussie.zone? This split community would have a rule that all posts would need to link to a news site or equivalent. Text & image posts would remain at !canada@lemmy.ca.
This would make it a lot easier to find text posts, general discussion threads, and image posts without them being drowned out by the news and (geo)political news threads.
One can look to !australia@aussie.zone and note how that community makes it clear in the rules that politics, (world) news, and geopolitics have to be posted into the Australian politics/(world) news communities. This makes the main Australia community much easier to browse and scroll through without going insane.
It already exists: !canadapolitics@lemmy.ca .
It’s just that there is a lot of political news permitted into !canada@lemmy.ca. It can also sometimes be hard to distinguish between notable news. For example, if there is a new Prime Minister, should c/Canada allow it? It does have significant implications for Canada.
Yea. I actually had !canadapolitics@lemmy.ca filtered, so I had to unblock it and edit my post.
In !australia@aussie.zone, they have a huge banner at the top of the sidebar telling users “Before you post, if it’s politics or world news, post it in the specific sub-communities at x and y”. It makes a huge difference in how the main Australia community is much less hectic and easier to find discussion and text posts, vs. !canada@lemmy.ca.
The sidebar of !canada@lemmy.ca does not have any banner or mention of !canadapolitics@lemmy.ca, but is instead buried underneath a collapsed menu. This I would think leads to users posting political and geopolitical news in !canada@lemmy.ca instead of !canadapolitics@lemmy.ca, which the latter is better suited for such posts.
It can also sometimes be hard to distinguish between notable news. For example, if there is a new Prime Minister, should c/Canada allow it?
In those instances, I suppose it is fine to post that in the main !canada@lemmy.ca community if it is that major. I’d imagine there would be text/general discussion posts relating to that issue, so such news would be in the main canada community anyways in that format.
I think filtering based on link posts vs. text and image posts would be valuable. Perhaps !canadapolitics@lemmy.ca and (world)news@lemmy.ca could become communities dedicated to link posts (posts that link to news sites, etc.), and then !canada@lemmy.ca would be text and image posts. (i.e., open ended discussion, etc.). It seems like right now !canadapolitics@lemmy.ca currently allows text posts as well, but I suppose that is fine and there isn’t that big of a need to change that.
It can also sometimes be hard to distinguish between notable news. For example, if there is a new Prime Minister, should c/Canada allow it?
