We're thinking about merging some of the cooking/food communities, want to get your input

Hello again!

So we, the food and cooking community mods, have been discussing merging a few of the communities together. We're pretty fractured at the moment and we don't really have the userbase to support so many niche communities so we're looking at merging some. We previously pinned a post asking users to cross-post to relevant communities and some of the feedback we received is some don't like this as it can clutter their feeds. Also there were many suggestions of merging until we get more growth and can support more nice communities.

So the plan would be to merge !askculinary, !bbq, !cooking, !food, and !recipes. This would combine a lot of the more general food communities into one and hopefully we reduce cross posting as well as grow users and content. Later, if we have a larger userbase that can support more niche communities, we can spin them off again. So, before moving forward with the merge, we wanted to make sure you all are aware of the plans as well as get some feedback on this decision. So please let us know what you think. We look forward to hearing your thoughts! Thanks!

EDIT: To explain how this would work, we have a couple options:

1. Lock all the niche communities and leave a pinned post pointing to the main Food community. Later we may reopen them once the userbase grows to support them.

2. Leave all communities open and cross post from the niche communities to the main one. So when you post a recipe to [email protected], it would get crossposted to [email protected]. [email protected] would be a catch all if you wanted the "fire hose" approach. Or you can sub to the niche communities you want.