If you recall reddits growth many of their communities evolved as offshoots of a single generic community. This made it easier for people to see discussions they normally would not get involved in, and once the posts in a similar category reached critical mass it moved to a sub Reddit.
I think people are recreating their niche communities here but they are floundering since the user base is still pretty small. Maybe it’s best to post to the “big” communities until the time is right to move to smaller, targeted communities?
I think that’s true for some niche topics, but other ones are better served by having dedicated communities from the start.
When I joined I made 2 magazines. One of them was about collecting Nintendo games and I quickly realized that I would have better discussions if I just joined the Nintendo magazine. I’ve basically abandoned it. The other I made, m/Otomegames I think is needed. We could post in the general gaming magazines, but there’s a whole bunch conventions and inside jokes that people who don’t play otome games wouldn’t understand.
Now for my shameless plug: do you like otome games? Do you not know what otome games are, but romance/adventure games made for women sounds intriguing? Come join us <- direct link. “@Otomegames @kbin.social” <- remove the space for federated peeps
I agree - there are plenty of empty magazines setup as subreddit clones. What we really need is a push encouraging content and comment submissions more than anything else. That’s what’s going to drive the development of a vibrant community on kbin.social.
Generally, unless you have at least 20 pieces of content from multiple users with active commentary, most folks will assume it’s a dead community and move on to a bigger community on lemmy.world or similar to find more content. One thing I would suggest for the moderators of growing communities is to always comment on, upvote and boost your contributors’ submissions in the beginning stages of community growth. Your personal engagement of the content is the first step in encouraging your readers to do the same.
That being said, I’d love for folks to create more new niche communities that didn’t exist on Reddit. There’s a lot more freedom here - we should take advantage of it.
This uncontrolled rush killed magazines. For example /m/hardware. I wanted to start something, but it was already reserved by someone who never posted anything in a month, not a post, not a comment anywhere. There is no link to other mags on the page, no rules, no nothing.
I messaged the guy to get the magazine back but never got any answer.
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