Am I making sense with that?
Example-- a very popular founder and content-creator upon multiple history subs recently retired. Now, I've tried to create at least a slow trickle of content with their departure (!historyart@piefed.social is one of the places), but a couple weeks ago someone made a comment that they missed the old days of ~10 new posts a day. Fair! Then I reminded them that there's 2,000+ posts already made in that community, and whenever they wanted to enjoy more content by the founder, well... it was just sitting there waiting for them.
*crickets*
TBH, that also seems to be the case with my own community. We're coming up on 700 posts now across 3+yrs, and I've put considerable work in to most of those posts, trying to make them mini-articles/editorials as often as possible, but it's the same thing... very few people want to look through the older content. It's like everything has to live and die on the stream, so to speak.
I mean-- is automated-posting and doomscrolling just the way it is, these days? And if so, does that have something to do with most people now browsing the Fediverse by mobile, instead of desktop?
Thanks for your opinions on this stuff. I'm honestly kinda baffled...
I was coming here to say this exact thing.
We've been conditioned for a very long time not not to necro posts. I know for many types of posts, they may be more in the moment type things (jokes, current events, etc) but things like all my animal stuff, that doesn't change, so I wouldn't care if someone would comment on an older post. If anything, I know more about the subject now than when I originally posted, but I know that probably isn't the majority of cases.
On reddit I occasionally get replies years after my original post/comment, and it always throws me a bit, like sitting in a time machine, travelling back to a random old conversation, the state that the discussed game was in at the time, etc.
I'm of a mixed mind if keeping old comment threads open is a good idea. For advice-based communities definitely, but for random conversations not really. The context changes, the people's lives changes, dragging old conversations back to life just feels out of place.
On the other hand some of the most legendary forum threads I've ever read were ones that got necro'd three times over ten years and are still running. SA has a few of those.
Since so many communities here are run by one or maybe 2 people, maybe adding a message about necros welcome or not welcome could be a thing.