[QUICK EDIT: This move is still in the works, just waiting for approval from FedeCan admins on PieFed.ca]
Hey all!
It's been about a year since the creation of this community, I wish I can recall the exact date, but regardless, the fact it's been that long gives me whiplash. When I made this community on my old Lemmy.ca account, I didn't expect it to gain over 300 subscribers, so before going into the rest of this announcement, I do want to say thanks to everyone for being a part of it, whether it posting and commenting, upvoting, or just silently interacting with the links posted.
Getting to the meat and potatoes of the announcement, in four or five days Maple Music will be migrating from Lemmy.ca to PieFed.ca. There's nothing wrong with Lemmy.ca, or the people behind it (especially seeing that the same people run PieFed.ca), but there's a bunch of key features in PieFed that will help the community grow in the long term.
To start off with, PieFed allows for post flairs. For a music community like Maple Music, this can be incredibly helpful for sorting posts by genres. If someone wants to find Canadian music of a specific genre, assuming they're using PieFed, they'll be able to click on the Flair of a certain genre like Country, Metal, Electronic, Hip-Hop, and so on, and be greeted with a curated feed of posts that include that Flair. For an example of this in action, feel free to check out the Obscure Music community on PieFed.social.
Secondly, an unfortunate annoyance in music and art sharing communities is people sharing content they like, only to receive downvotes. While the downvote feature is, in my personal opinion, important overall, it gets annoying when users share content they enjoy only to be downvoted by those who are not the target demographic. Moving to PieFed from Lemmy would help alleviate this, as PieFed software has an option to restrict downvotes to community members. Doing this will help build a more positive community by preventing new posters from feeling discouraged by downvotes from users with uncurated feeds, while also leaving the downvote feature open for legitimate use cases (controversial musicians, problematic lyrics, etc.).
A huge feature that PieFed has over Lemmy is the Wiki feature. Moving Maple Music to PieFed.ca will allow the development of a dedicated wiki for finding Canadian music and musicians which is readily accessible without needing to pin dedicated "Megathread" posts. This can be useful for easier sorting of music resources by region if one wishes to find music from a specific province or territory, as well as documenting weekly Featured Artists (Which will come back!)
Lastly, PieFed comes with various other improvements that will likely benefit the community such as polls, support for hashtags (which will help for finding music of specific sub-genres), and a number of helpful moderation tools.
Adding a personal opinion between the two, I'm personally of the belief that open source should support open source, and on top of the features PieFed has too offer, I personally just like the fact that the source code for PieFed is hosted on Codeberg rather than GitHub.
If anybody has any thoughts before the move, feel free to share them here. Seeing that Maple Music has been federated with PieFed.ca for some time now, posts from Lemmy.ca should be migrated into the new community, removing the concern of losing content contributed to the community.