there’s no communities for my niche interests!!!
more like “i want a ready-made community where other people already putting effort into posting cool and intersting stuff, and all I want to do is sit on my ass and shower posts generously with “”“muh upvotes™””“”
This is kind of bullshit. On a big platform, like Reddit, where there are orders of magnitude more users, the likelihood is that there are a good number of people interested in whatever niche topic you want. That’s a draw for a lot of people. I left Reddit for Lemmy for good, but we’re just not up to that kind of user base.
And it’s not zero effort to get a community going and keep it active, especially with a small user base. It’s perfectly reasonable for someone to want a place that discusses their niche interest without wanting to be responsible for running that place. It doesn’t make them bad or lazy.
I look at the nfl community here. It really only gets a handful of posts on Sunday and that’s it. It blows my mind that there isn’t more engagement
I wonder if that’s related to a user base that skews heavily toward techies.
Im sure youre right. My point is thats not even a niche topic. A quick Google estimates there are 21 million viewers PER GAME every week. There are literally hundreds of millions of fans of the nfl, but even a subject so popular can’t maintain a healthy community on lemmy, how are these niche topics supposed to stand a chance at survival?
It is a niche topic, here, where we all use Linux btw (or at least we keep our mouths shut if we don’t, for fear of being mobbed:-D).
We talk about what we want to talk about here. Linux, memes, TV, uh… Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, beans, jeans, not pooping - and I think that’s pretty much it, except for politics, am I missing anything? 😁
Like another user said, if Lemmy doesn’t have the numbers to support the niche communities you want, maybe you need to move one level up the niche.
Like maybe there isn’t enough NFL activity on Lemmy yet to keep the NFL community active… But could there be enough sports fans to keep a sports community active? Could you perhaps settle for sharing a space with NHL, MBL, and/or soccer fans in a community that sacrifices a little bit of specificity for broadness to encourage activity?
“US sport” with hashtags for NFL, NHL, … could be a way.
Sure, whatever. The point is I think the key to Lemmy, at least during this community-building stage, is narrowing in on the right level of specificity of niches which can be supported here. Maybe “NFL” is too niche, so we try “sports.” But then maybe “sports” is too broad so “US sports” is the solution. The point is negotiating the level of specificity to find the more zeroed-in on option that can still receive enough engagement to be viable.
!football@lemmy.world is the same. I’m quite surprised too, but I guess the Lemmy demographics is just not into professional sports
The epitome of the meme.
“Why complain about lacking a community when you can create your own ghost town”
Is there any way we could talk about the niche communities, and promote them all at one place. I know it’s already there but I don’t remember where, it’s clearly a broken system.
I did. There’s almost zero engagement. My most popular thread is a meta narrative about me being in there talking to myself. There were at least two other attempts that are even more inactive. Not enough of y’all are into synthesizers.
I’d never seen this community before. Subscribed!
I’m terrible at keyboards, but I do like to play with 'em.
Welcome to the club!
Same! On all those things
We need better discoverable tools. I subscribed to the community
Welcome!
😄😁👋
For curiosity, where did you advertise the community? In the “new communities”/“find a community” communities? In music-related communities? Or both?
Hmm. I made no effort to advertise at all. I came during the Rexodus last year after the API kerfuffle. Initially, it seemed promising, and I didn’t think I’d need to, but activity died down quite quickly. I’ve never moderated a community before or anything like that. I certainly don’t want to it to become a full time job. I have enough of those.
Maybe the answer is a better search engine to find the communities.
I don’t even know how to find new communities that aren’t part of my instance. Is there some place that just lists them by date created?
Lemmy Explorer will do it…I think. “Newest publish time” sort is what you’re looking for, I think.
On my instance you just click “Communities” at the top and it gives you a list of communities with three options at the top Subscribed/Local/All just like the main feed. Click all and you can browse or search the list of all communities, though the search is not great.
Your instance does need to know about these communities existing first though. For recently created communities on another instance that might not be the case. Which is where services like Lemmy Explorer help.
whoa, Lemmy explorer is a great resource, thanks!
That would certainly help.
I wish instead that people would post in the general communities first, then spin off into a new community if there is interest.
Like, we don’t need a whole community for the new Dragon Age game or whatever, but we do have a games community that would benefit from the post. Then if there are 20 Dragon Age posts every day it could obviously support it’s own community.
This. All of us Reddit Refugees (me included) fucked up when we arrived and put the cart before the horse. Lemmy is like a small town; you may simply not get all the specific communities you want, but there’s probably somebody with a similar enough interest that they’ll talk to you about the stuff you like, and they probably have things that you would like to talk about if you saw it. Higher-level categories should do fine unless and until a certain type of content starts to annoy other users by its sheer prevalence.
As someone else said, Lemmy is the niche community.
Yeah, there’s no use in speed-running Reddit.
Let’s make our own thing.
I’ve been pondering orbs, don’t know what y’all are doing.
Mostly stuff with beans.
So true, we were trying to shape lemmy into reddit so much that we skipped few steps like this which even reddit had to go through.
Making the community doesn’t mean it has any activity. There’s tons of communities already made for a bunch of niche topics. None of them are being posted in. There’s also communities that aren’t niches that also lack activity.
!eldenring@lemmy.world only has about 3 active users, not including myself. The DLC is still pretty new and it’s a massively popular game.
Yea, I really want to see Elden Ring community thrive.
Have you promoted it on !newcommunities@lemmy.world ? Seems strange to have such low activity while !stardewvalley@lemm.ee and !factorio@lemmy.world are quite active
Can’t wait for 0 people to join my Haibane Renmei community that I don’t have the experience or patience to mod, nor the understanding of the source material to justify creating it in the first place
ETA: I just searched, and found out one person already has made a Haibane Renmei community. It has one subscriber, the person who made it, who has been inactive since 2022. There are some things that simply can’t be replicated in a smaller platform.
Modding a niche Lemmy community is a breeze, honestly
Not much is happening, but not many troublemakers, either. Modding is pretty much zero effort.
Post something and see if you can stir up activity?
Haibane Renmei
I had to look this up, is it Lain adjacent? Very similar artworks.
Very Lain adjacent! Yoshitoshi Abe did the character design for Serial Experiments Lain before making Haibane Renmei. There are many Lain fans in the Haibane community
Well I might just might check it out this weekend. Thank you.
whining about whining. classic!
Sure man, lemme just real quick create a whole ass community, spend countless hours striving to attract people and moderate it when these guys try to post some horrifying shit… all that to find the location of the one missing collectible from the game that I’m currently trying to complete.
The thing is, communities need people. People who post in the community. Most new communities get a few members, a handful of posts, and then just die.
Counterpoint: Sometimes you can kickstart a community that you want to see just by consistently posting content. !science_memes@mander.xyz is my favourite example – it was essentially one person who created that entire community (and it’s since been diversifying somewhat – at least there’s traction in the comments).
But to reinforce your point: I did !spacemusic@lemmy.ca and tried to do the same thing, but it sort of petered out. But it’s way way more niche.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. Just engage with the content you like and build some places for content you’d like to see.
We’re complaining because we don’t want to be the ones to post, lol.
A phenomenon I’ve seen on Lemmy a lot is all of a sudden the All feed will be pages on end of the same user posting in the same community I’ve never heard of before. They get blocked. Spread that traffic out. You want people to go “oh there’s a community for that now” not “Oh my god will you comprehensively shut up?!” Lemmy.nsfw is often guilty of this.
Right now on the community for the Satisfactory game, almost all of the traffic is a guy posting “Day 44 of posting screenshots every day until I get bored.” That community is as good as dead. When it’s almost entirely one guy’s vomit pile, it’s as good as dead.
Don’t over-post.
The problem is that the niche community exist. In fact it probably exists several times, one in each instance with a small number of followers. Which makes really hard to go and decide in which community you want to invest.
It’s one fundamental problem of federative systems and to be solved some of the federal nature need to be partially given away, but I think is necessary. I propose two solutions:
- Automatic merging of communities. All communities with the same name within a federation are de facto replicated. So a post in any community just replicate in all. It will make it seem like there’s only one community.
2 Discourage. Everytime you try to create a community that already exists in other instance a pop up appears that encourage you to just go to the other community. For already duplicated communities messages are sent to concentrate in the biggest one.
That popup idea is something that could work, and something that one could suggest on Lemmy’s github for implementation.
Kbin had a cool feature where you could see other subs where a link was reposted to, was great for finding what’s active or dead.
Wish that one made it to Lemmy.
That’s already the case on the Lemmy web UI and lost og the apps
Thanks! I’m currently going through my hobbies and I’m gonna start posting and subbing to all of them.
You’re right, I should be posting more if I want engagement.
Can recommend. Sometimes it does really well, sometimes it doesn’t. Its worth a try anytime anyways
Yes! It is worth a try!
I don’t think there are any" rant" communities?
Lemmy needs that kind of large general topic community to redirect users to smaller niches communities.
I too also wouldn’t want to mod it, but I think it’d be great for herding up angry lemmy users sharing the same frustrations, so they could be redirected or start new communities for the particular topic.
The reason is that everyone enjoy reading and writing rants about something, so the rant community will automatically grow many subscribers coming in from all kinds of searches.
For example, a user ranting about “womens pants without pockets” would get much more engagement than someone just creating and posting about a community for womens pants. The rant comment section would also already often include the potential users for a new community.
The general discussion doesn’t really cut it, because it’s too nice and polite and weird angry rants don’t really fit in there.
The thing is that (also in real life) when someone needs something bad enough, they’ll get angry, and that anger can be channeled into something useful, because they’re willing to collaborate with others who can help them or who at least supports them.
I mean, that redirection then needs to work. At the moment, nobody in the Movie/TV communities is redirecting me to a specific TV show community saying “hey this exists, you can also post there”. Etc etc.
We have a pinned post on !showsandmovies@lemm.ee , isn’t it pinned on your side?
Lol it absolutely is there, I just missed it somehow
New user here. Where should I create my community? Are there servers or groups or something that I should review first? I don’t know the difference between a server and .world or .ml or whatever.
.world and .ml are servers. I’d recommend choosing a server related to your topic (programming.zone if it’s comp sci related, for example), and try to avoid piling into the largest ones (.world and .ml, etc.).
Thank you very much for the response
Is reddthat a server? Should all of the communities inside a server be related? I’m asking because I want to create communities but I don’t know where it’s appropriate to do so. For example, if I want to create a sub for venting about family, is it okay to do that on any server? Or do I have to go digging to find the “correct” server?
Yes, you could create a community on reddthat (if that server allows for new communities to be created and hasn’t disabled that feature).
No, they don’t need to be all related. A server admin likely would tell you “hey please don’t create this one here, because this server’s focus is xy”.
That’s more info than I’ve been able to find anywhere on Lemmy lol thank you very much
You’re welcome!
Come to !fedigrow@lemm.ee , it’s a community dedicated to community growth
