I’ve been using Lemmy for a couple years now, and unfortunately I’ve noticed a significant decline in the niche communities that were originally active. When I first joined I saw much more variety when browsing the All feed. But over time, the communities I liked have faded as shitposting and meme communities have come to dominate the platform.
I think this shift has changed the culture of Lemmy. There seems to be more of a herd mentality now, where people downvote reasonable opinions they disagree with. The discussions don’t feel as nuanced. Some people have even been attacked for innocuous comments that don’t align with the prevailing groupthink.
The niche communities that made Lemmy special are fading away, and the resulting monoculture makes me less inclined to participate. I want a platform that supports substantive discussions in my interests, not just memes and shitposting.
I don’t know what the solution is on a platform level, but a culture shift is needed if Lemmy wants to retain users like me who valued the diversity of opinions. I may have to move to a platform that allows better filtering and proportionality between niche interests and funny or stupid content. I want Lemmy to succeed, but right now I’m finding myself drawn back to Reddit because the niche communities there seem more active. I’ll keep checking in, but Lemmy needs to recapture its original spirit if I’m going to make it my main home.
And like virtually every one of the similar complaints, this comes from someone who isn’t otherwise active, so basically boils down to “I’ve noticed that other people aren’t providing me with enough content. What can we do to get other people to provide me with more content?”
If you want to get more activity in niche communities, POST! And not just once - do it again and again, day in and day out.
The communities that you appreciate didn’t just spring into being - they grew, over time, because people did exactly that.
You, two months ago. The quote perfectly encapsulates why niche communities aren’t taking off and why the demographic here will always be nerdy and tech-focused.
Every single one of the Reddit communities I followed that tried to move to Lemmy inevitably went back. There’s a ton of reasons why, like instances going down, poor moderation, unreliable servers, and general confusion as to how a Lemmy account works to name a few. The apps not being up to par at the time were a huge factor also. It’s highly unlikely that Reddit will ever see an organized effort to seek out communities off-site ever again, so the chance to just transplant a community in its entirety over to Lemmy is gone. Now we’re pretending it’s going to be possible to take a niche site (Lemmy, compared to the wider internet) and somehow develop niche communities from an active pool of users a fraction of a fraction of Reddit’s. It’s not happening.
It’s a tough pill to swallow, but if you have a problem with Reddit you’re in the minority. I’m fine with maintaining a Reddit account to communicate with people who are still on Reddit. I go where the users are. I’m not going to sit in an empty community for months talking to myself while conversations are happening elsewhere. It is what it is.
And I stand by everything I said there.
And I also believe that the threadiverse will continue to grow overall.
And I don’t believe that those two things are in any way contradictory.
I am sure you are very knowledgable and have complex reasons for believing certain things will or will not happen with the fediverse, but you have to remember the growth that came to lemmy from the reddit-bs was massive, unexpected and utterly unpredictable in BOTH magnitude and timing.
We can’t know the future, lemmy is far more functional now than it was when the reddit burst happened and the future is unwritten.
Yea some of the communities I’m helping with just didn’t exist before we spun them up in the past few months. They’re new and fairly niche
There are other niche communities that I’m curious about and would like to see more from, but I don’t have experience in those areas to know what’s interesting/ relevant. I post what I can, but there are probably others that can do it better
I agree with this. And with the OP. And I haven’t even read their whole post, making this even more legit in a way. Post!
Doesn’t work. If you post to a dead community it’s still dead. I see my single comment on the all feed. I think a lot like myself find going to reddit more and more. Duplicate posts by a bot or something. Really weird sexual communities and not much else
For example I wanted to see what people thought of a new ev car.ooked st car communities and nothing had been published and no posts. Searched reddit and found 100 comments page.
I agree there is more discussion on Reddit
Some of the Lemmy communities need some promo too. Maybe the few people subscribed don’t use those accounts anymore
Over time as you post more stuff, people subscribe from ALL or from the crossposted communities. You can also promote the community by talking about it in tangently related posts, or !communityPromo@lemmy.ca type places
Which makes sense until they go to the community and it’s dead. So then they don’t interact. There’s 3 valheim subs. Each has ,20+ members. There’s no activity. I was trying post updates but it wouldn’t let me.
Yeah. I don’t know what these “just post” types think it’s like. I tried making some relatively niche posts early on, trying to spark discussion in communities for some games I was playing. Got a single digit number of comments at most. Sometimes none. Small communities don’t get seen and niche posts in bigger communities are less likely to get votes. It feels very discouraging if you spend 30 minutes to make a post that seemingly nobody even sees.
Some folks here don’t seem to want to hear it because they badly want Lemmy to be better (and I kinda get that), but where niche communities are concerned, Reddit is unfortunately better.
Also, the “jUsT PoSt” replies are acting like everyone wants to post. Not everyone does and we shouldn’t be acting like they’re idiots because they don’t want to be the one to make the posts. It’s perfectly valid to want to read other people’s posts. There’s also some stuff you just can’t post and expect it to work. Eg, I read episode discussions on Reddit. Those can really only take off if you post them immediately when the episode airs. It feels like only Star Trek has those here. For every other show, I just go back to Reddit.
Posting in a vacuum is pretty pointless. We need engagement but we need the posts for that. I’ll leave a comment but I’m far superior at replying to comments than I am at starting discussions.
And as to said. After you’ve wasted time curating a few comments and getting nothing back. You’ll just stop.
I agree with you. That’s why I make an effort to at least leave a comment every time I use the app.
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Is this the new version of “the lurkers support me in email”?