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 did remind me to create a community for the one subreddit I used the most before I left reddit, r/jakeandamir. Thank you, I did that today!
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.
You just reminded me to post in this new community I joined recently, so thank you.
I will not whine about the lack of this niche community, because both c/Indiana and c/Indiana@midwest.social exist, but boy do I wish they were even close to as active as r/Indiana was when I was on Reddit.
There is just not a good place to discuss state politics that I can find and I learned a lot through discussion.
I keep looking where on my local ATM machine that I can exchange internet points to ducats
doubloons would be acceptable likewise as well
For someone whose major gripe is whining you sure seem to do a lot of it.
I take offense to it because you’re suggesting that the problem is us, and not the system which resulted in empty communities
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?
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!
Lemmy Explorer will do it…I think. “Newest publish time” sort is what you’re looking for, I think.
That would certainly help.
“Why complain about lacking a community when you can create your own ghost town”
Exactly
Someone has already created my niche community, and there are 2 people in it, and it hasn’t grown since I joined, and that makes the conversations in it boring af
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.
Post something and see if you can stir up activity?
Modding a niche Lemmy community is a breeze, honestly
Not much is happening, but not many troublemakers, either. Modding is pretty much zero effort.
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
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.
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.
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 popup idea is something that could work, and something that one could suggest on Lemmy’s github for implementation.
I like it, but that’s not the model Lemmy was built around.
It’d be neat if, instead of posting to a community you posted to your instance and tagged your post with a topic, and then instances could contain topic aggregators with moderators that moderated their local view of the topic.
But even that comes with challenges around protection at-risk people like kids, where nobody is fully able to control the discourse around them.
I don’t agree with either of those. Just not what federation is. A bettet solution would be to implement a category section that you can edit or automatically parses similar names.
Yeah I don’t agree with that either considering that any Joe Blow could essentially snipe a community either with an unpopular instance federating and posting garbage (which mods on other instances can’t even remove) or by using a popular instance to create that duplicate community and then posting content there that even more people are likely to see and siphon away from an already established community.
Second option is also a bad idea, the less guardrails the better.
My solution is one I’ve discussed with many people on Lemmy now. What we need are topics or in other words, the ability for reposts on followed communities not to be seen more than once. If that feature also allows for federating the actual repost to where by default all comments to to the same thread, that would be perfect.
This enables people to post to a main community and a niche community at the same exact time without spamming members who follow both communities. Then the main community gets alerted of the niche communities existence and the niche community benefits from the content.
That way we develop this sort of hub system that’s really nice where the general communities like a gaming community aren’t just generic, they feature posts from all niches in that sphere and alert you to new stuff you might enjoy. That’s my rant.
I like the topic system. Allows to post and see without worries of duplication.
I see this response all the time “create your own if you want to see niche communities and Reddit communities migrate here.” Well, if I have the bloody time to moderate, or even if I do, will there be many people? And if there are many people, do I have the time to moderate? What if there are mod bickering and drama?
The question is time. Does anyone else have the time to moderate and put up with BS inevitable with most communities?
I’ve been asking for a personal finance community for a while. The only US-based one I’ve found is on .ml, which…ew. I haven’t made one because I do not have the time to mod a big, popular sub like that one will hopefully become.
Buuuuut I got tired of waiting for someone else to do it so I made it: https://lemmy.world/c/personalfinance_us@fedia.io
I’m sure it will be a shitshow but at least I tried.
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.
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.
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
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.
How about no, that sounds super depressing
Why would I do that? That doesn’t get anyone what they want
Pretty much what I’m doing at !amiga@sopuli.xyz
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.
You’ll be lucky to get a couple up votes.
It’s like streaming with no viewers, only the activity you’ve doing isn’t something fun you’d be doing anyways, eg gaming
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!
