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™””“”
The culture is not conducive here; Lemmings have no chill.
“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.
A community dedicated to all the niche communities, I like this. A post a day highlighting various ones or where people can announce the ones they’ve created. This is a good idea to at least spread the word of their existence
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.
Especially if you didn’t have a lot of spare time. With an active community you can just dip into discussions when you have the time. With a community you’re trying to establish yourself you absolutely have to provide a steady stream of content until it (hopefully) takes off.
Right, exactly. And let’s not forget that a healthy percentage of all online communities is made of lurkers who don’t really want to post at all, but they enjoy reading stuff they’re interested in.
You could always go one level up. Like instead of a crochet community and a knitting community you could have a yarn community that incorporates all types of weaving with yarn.
For sure, though that really doesn’t solve the problem. If I’m really into sports-themed shot glasses, making a post in a community for drinking ware, or for sports merchandise, isn’t going to mean I get more content about sports shot glasses, and it doesn’t increase the number of people on the site who have something to say about them. On a platform with millions of users, there might be enough other people with the same interest to generate a critical mass of content.
Yeah but everyone seems to be expecting Lemmy to just turn into the high point of Reddit. Reddit wasn’t built in a day and neither will Lemmy be built in a day.
Completely agree. I personally I’m fine with the trade-off I made. There’s even some benefits to a smaller site. I remember on Reddit there were lots of times I didn’t make a comment, even when I had something to say, because there were already literally thousands of comments, some with thousands of upvotes, and I figured anything I said would be lost in the din. Here, if you’ve got something to say, it’s very likely to be seen.
When I see a really bad take and click on their profile to block and see their posts, it’s one I interacted positively so I just leave it. Happened more than I thought it would.
deleted by creator
I think you clicked the wrong comment to reply to.
I did, thanks.
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?
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?
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
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.
The problem isn’t that they won’t create them, there’s insufficient biomass to populate them.
If I want to talk about a 5-year-old video game with myself, I’ll just open Notepad.
As @Zombiepirate@lemmy.world said in a comment here, we can use general communities to find “biomass needed” to populate small communities
Although I can see the point you are making, and I agree to some extent. I still think it is better to try
I totally agree, and I did try. It was just some kind of soul reposting things from Reddit and me.
Feel free to drop a post on !oldgamers@lemmy.world if you want to talk old games.
I’ve moderated communities before. No thanks.
Yep, be the change you want to see in the world.
Also, making communities is fun! I made !cartographyanarchy@lemm.ee and it is booming thanks to several lemmings who I got to post consistently. Shout out to thepiccardmanuever.
Lurkers complain where creators entertain
A lurker never complains. That is why they are lurkers.
I lurker is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.
You never know a real lurker is there. None of us are lurkers.
Oh but some do create very helpful content like “repost!” comments to help people seeing old content from getting embarrassed by not realizing all discussion about that content has been done already.
Some try to improve stories by adding claims of applause or a famous person offering a sum of money, probably because it’s silly to imagine such embellishments and they like joining in on the fun.
Yes putting in the same amount of effort as the reposter.
Like you’ve been shown that there’s no simple answer over and over again here, but one problem I face hasn’t been mentioned. What if I want to subscribe to communities that I can’t participate in? Not every community is about hobbies, some is people talking about their life which is totally unlike mine and I like to read that. One I always pick as an example is r/arrangedmarriage. I love(d) reading that subreddit to explore a world that is so foreign to me. I’m a white woman from Europe as far removed from marriage as one could be on this earth. Why should someone follow an c/arrangedmarriage I of all people created and mod? Not everyone joins niche communities because they are directly relevant to their life.
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.
Hey speaking of, while !games@lemmy.world is a great example, if you’re not finding similar communities for your interest, feel free to post over in !general@lemmy.world for what Zombiepirate’s describing.
Hobby without a community around here? Just not really sure if an existing community is open to non-news posts? General’s got ya covered.
Going against the post’s spirit, but…If you’re not finding a community for your interests (or only finding abandoned/inactive ones), and don’t want to create one (or try to get existing ones going), you’re welcome over in !general@lemmy.world. Post about whatever, find likeminded folks, then if ya think there’s enough of ya, you can make a separate community without it being one person posting into a void.
Also there’s !justpost@lemmy.world. Similar vibes.
This probably has a much higher accuracy rate.
This is the lifecycle of internet forums
“I’m sick of this place, I’m going somewhere new!” > “This place is deserted” > “Let’s diversify and get more users” > “There are more users but they are all posting content I’m not interested in” > “I’m sick of this place, I’m going somewhere new!”
I’ve been through at least half a dozen such cycles, it’s just a normal part of life when you live vicariously through an ethernet cable. Lemmy will grow, get old, go to shit, and die, and half the population will move somewhere else. Probably Pylon.
whining about whining. classic!
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.
No one is gonna engage lol
Doesn’t matter. Even if it get only 3 or 4 upvotes still doesn’t fucking matter. Just create a community and flood it with content.
I’d call that a “webpage” though, one with an ill-fitting name. One person with a sandwich board and a megaphone yelling at a few passers by who at best smile, give a half-hearted thumbs up, then walk away.
To me, for it to live up to the name “community” that implies several people sharing stuff and a bit of reciprocity.
Of course that might take time, the first poster might be one of those proverbial people planting those trees that they’re never going benefit fron the shade of. Theres no harm in just creating it making a few posts and leaving them there- it might become active eventually. But it could be never and it will inevitably take a lot longer if the platform only has a million users a day total than if it had a billion.
You can probably do some sort of critical-mass / chain-reaction / markov chain type model to get a handle on the chances of a niche community becoming active in small population. Like that ‘Drake equation’ for trying to stop people wasting resources on SETI.
I don’t know if someone is even upvoting your post and in a while replying to it. I consider it as engagement. Sorry, I am GenZ. So, I have different definition of online community.
oh “online community” , sorry I think I’ve misunderstood this whole thing. I mean, I don’t even know what a GenZ are. Is that, like, doing the emails? https://youtu.be/jK-ZRxeJIiU?t=14
Pretty much what I’m doing at !amiga@sopuli.xyz
