Sorry for the long post, but this has been on my mind a lot lately as the community has had some time without shinobu and I have gotten to see how people/this community have adjusted.

Changing the front matter of the posts is something that @chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org and I have talked about in the past; making the links in the post body more relevant, or slimming down the bulk of the post body to what is most commonly used. If nothing else, this shinobu outage has reinforced my opinion that having an automated thread generation process and collecting all the threads in one place is ultimately better than users creating wildcat threads ad hoc. Things like timing/formatting/searchability just aren’t consistent that way.

I also think this has been a nice experiment to see how people react to having episode discussion threads colocated alongside news/general threads or whether they are better kept separate to the episode_discussion community. I personally think that with the volume of news/general posts to this community, adding all the discussion threads would pretty much push everything else off the page. I know that is how reddit and the ml community ran, but I think having them separate works better for a small community like this one. If the community keeps growing, then it might be worth reopening the discussion.

Finally, my utopian vision for how this might work in the future, is that we keep episode discussion posts in a separate community posted by an automated process, but at the same time, have a pinned post in the main community that collects links to all the episode discussions posted by the bot that week (ideally kept up to date by the bot itself when a new post is made). This keeps the deluge of episode discussion posts off the main community, but makes it relatively easy to find a show’s discussion thread in the other community even if it is buried by newer discussion posts.

Edit: For now, the best I can offer is the thread linked in the sidebar maintained by @MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz that collects relevant communities. Though they haven’t added their own !dungeonmeshi@ani.social community yet!