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™””“”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For curiosity, where did you advertise the community? In the “new communities”/“find a community” communities? In music-related communities? Or both?
We need better discoverable tools. I subscribed to the community
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
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
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
What are you talking about all of you here man! Spending a sec of your time on a community about a subject that you are interested is a really big task for you? That’s lame and lazy and shows lack of any vision
You should already brainstorming to make communities more innovative and better than reddit
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.
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.
I see this, and am upvoting:-).
deleted by creator
I think you clicked the wrong comment to reply to.
I did, thanks.
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.
Genuinely… why though? Why not post once a week rather than per day? Or per month? Who is counting? If people want to join then they will, if not then they won’t, but either way will one post per day for the last six months make any difference to their decision vs. one post per week?
I am no good at what I do. I try to enjoy it anyway.:-) Do with that what you will.
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
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.
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? 😁
The epitome of the meme.
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.
As a man whose started 7 different communities I’d like to defend those people saying, if you don’t immediately get a good response it starts feeling like screaming into the void.
I started a meme community !aneurysmposting@sopuli.xyz and it immediately took off and is doing well. On the other hand other my worst community got 2-3 people making one or two comments after a month of 2 posts everyday.
Meme communities do well. Niche communities require lots of people finding it and being active.
But even aneurysmposting, the most successful wouldn’t survive if I wasn’t regularly posting. Partially bc people just forget a community exists. I end up posting in the same 10-15 communities since I can’t think of relevant communities to post in; even if they exist very often.
I enjoy running aneurysmposting and !inmymind@lemmy.dbzer0.com since there only I can post and there is no pressure. It basically is like posting to local, but I have an archive if everything I post.
Similarly !shortstories@literature.cafe is another community I made and enjoy posting on, but my posts are like 50% of that instance and 80% of that community. But its a great community otherwise.
The other 4 have been different levels of disappointing.
Hey fam, go to !fedigrow@lemm.ee and check out the weekly “How are you doing with your communities?” post if you haven’t already. It’s like a support group for people keeping niche communities alive.
Hi my name is variants and I’m a niche community mod
starts sobbing
Oh yeah I gotta go do that sometime
I feel you as I too struggled to keep small community afloat and alive. And it sometimes does feel like you are screaming in to the void. I was kinda fortunate in a sense that my community got atleast some trafficin votes/comments and that motivated me to stay and post.
My point is that it’s always better to try to do something (even if it fails) than just whine about it.
I also want to salute you (and people like you), we are all here in part because you take time of your day to find\make and post stuff. Even if in the moment it doesen’t get noticed or feels like it’s in vain, know that it is never for nothing - you’re making the hour\day or even week of 100s of people better
Comments come in which keeps the motivation. The issue is if I’m busy for a week or month I come back to a dead community. (And I’m not gonna use a bot to keep regular activity, that idea grosses me out.)
But yeah I do think a lot more people could try and perhaps don’t go super niche, but try making a community for a genre or subgenre. Music will get more traction than folk music which will get more traction than Bob Dylan and yet you can post the same thing you want from the niche in the other 2.
PS. This is the kind of situation where you should link your community so people like me can join in.
Absolutely this. I’ve started a few, and after being the only one to ever post on one of them, I have practically given up. It also burned me out of a hobby.
And still, the community I started ( !dontdeadopeninside@lemmy.ohaa.xyz ) somewhat exists alongside it. Although Im afraid you’ve won.
Well you started later and used a reddit import as a template which people can be a little averse to. But the community is doing really well and you’ve taken good care of it. Keep it up mate!
Y=x^2 lmao
The comments on that post genuinely made my day.
Ps. Not to complain but -x²
Damnit
whining about whining. classic!
