I’ll go first. I wish Lemmy communities existed for: destroyed tanks. Ukraine War video report. sopranos duckposting. benzodiazepines.
I will comment more as I think of them.
Pathfinder_Kingmaker. I spent ages talking about builds and strategies on that reddit sub. I still miss guiding new players into the games. The BG3 community is the closest I’ve found but it doesn’t scratch quite the same itch due to 5e’s simplicity.
Pathfinder does have a few active communities but they are all for the tabletop. The one for the game on Lemmy.world is dead as a doornail.
Lemmy is generally too small for it, but I liked the small regional subreddits like states, counties, and cities.
I know there is a Lemmy instance focused on Atlanta and Atlanta news but that’s about it.
Someone had a Dallas or Texas group on here (I forget now), but they had such strict posting rules I stopped posting and the thing died pretty quick after.
There’s still a Texas one. I think Dallas and/or DFW died.
midwest.social has a few for the midwestern states
I run a regional instance (lemmy.pt, for Portugal and the Portuguese language) and I definitely feel the hardships of Lemmy being so small. It’s very hard to grow more specialized communities when the overall pull of the platform is so small, since most people looking for ““niche”” topics would rather stick to the bigger communities on Reddit and whatnot instead of opting for the tiny thing going on the Fediverse.
Even on reddit, PT subs are hard to get active. There is /r/Portugal, literaciafinanceira and maybe devpt. I think you are stretching too thin.
Have you thought of just doing 1 sub on Lemmy.pt, and just add [tags] in the title or something? Once Lemmy.pt has enough users, you could slowly open more.
Yeah, sure. That’s because we’re also fairly small and Reddit isn’t really that popular, especially among older folks.
Regarding the 1 sub, I don’t think the issue is having too many communities, seeing as !portugal@lemmy.pt serves as a main hub and has pretty loose restrictions already. The issue is more of the overall visibility of Lemmy paired with the low usage of Reddit-like mediums in Portugal.
Well thanks for your service at keeping a regional instance running! It may not be my region, but I’m glad it exists at all!
I hope it eventually becomes a “if you build it, they will come” type situation. It will just take time and growth.
Yeah, hopefully! The instance exists since 2021 and we’re still small, even with the 2022 Reddit blackout. A lot of people registered then, but quickly realized Reddit was still bigger and went back. It’s a shame, but I’ll keep it running for as long as I can.
Literally the only thing I miss about Reddit is my city sub.
I used to miss my local city sub more, but the current mods have basically turned it into a reddit version of Nextdoor.
10 years ago it was mostly punks and weirdos on the sub, then all the normies came and even the fucking local sheriff.
The local sheriff finally fucked off after he got called out for trying to hire a murderer from a neighboring jurisdiction.
I feel like if Lemmy could get big enough, we could get back to where the interesting people are all in one place again.
Our city sub never really had those kinds of issues, drama to be sure from time to time, but for the most part it was just a great place to learn what events were happening that weekend. Or get inside info on something that happened in the news, etc. I have checked in on it a couple times since deleting my Reddit accounts, but it’s not the same and feels off since joining lemmy.
r/ireland was great (as well as the regional subreddits from Ireland). There is an Irish community (!ireland@lemmy.world)on Lemmy that I try to post to but there’s just not that much engagement at the moment, having said that, it has improved.
EDIT: added the community.
Feddit.dk is doing pretty alright - it’s small, for sure, but it’s nice :)
I wish lemmy communties existed for:
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- How are you doing today?
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- Did you discover anything new to your consciousnesses today?
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- I fucke’ed today. Here is how.
Anything else is irrelevant fuck’d up garbage.
Maybe try out !casualconversation@lemm.ee?
The one on feddit.uk is also great.
Hey hey hey there is a TIFU community already.
It totally needs more engagement though
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/c/DSP. Digital signal processing, i.e. how to transform, filter, and live with digital signals (e.g. audio files, image files, video files, sensor measurements, etc.). It involves a lot of math, so unless we get R*ddit-like numbers I don’t really know how such a community could keep moving.
I miss the non-porn nudes threads, Normalnudes and NakedProgress, the ones with an “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything” policy where people of all body types could show their shape and/or their fitness progress.
/Factorio
I wish Voyager would copy links in this format as I’m too lazy.
Maybe I’ll write a bot when I’m less lazy.
one for 1001albumsgenerator
I wish there was more sports engagement, specifically college and pro football. It’s about the only thing that keeps me going back over to the other place.
have you tried discord? That’s my favorite place to chat live sports
I mean, yeah, but the question was about what do I wish was on Lemmy.
I could follow a college football community. Is there a general one - not team specific? Maybe things will pick up in the fall?
There’s a whole sports server at fanatacus.social, but it doesn’t seem to get much engagement for some reason.
Enlisted (the video game). I enjoyed the discussions on the subreddit. It’s already got a small community, so it’s no surprise that it’s nonexistent on Lemmy.
I just want the communities that already exist to have more engagement. It’s pretty demoralizing making a high-effort post and getting only a handful of upvotes and no comments. And it’s like watching a hospice patient visiting a neat-sounding community and realizing all the posts are by the single moderator (and are getting less and less frequent).
I think one of the best ways for folks to contribute to the health of Lemmy would be for everyone to spend some time on “all - new” (or even “all - top hour”) on occasion. “New” on Lemmy is not the cesspool of reposts and garbage that it was on Reddit (although there is a LOT of porn if you don’t have NSFW toggled off), and the quality of the first few pages of “top hour” is usually pretty good (except again for the porn, which it turns out gets pretty decent engagement). I visit “top hour” pretty regularly, and nearly all posts that are stuck in zero-engagement/minimal-engagement pergatory are simply niche content rather than bad content.
visiting a neat-sounding community and realizing all the posts are by the single moderator (and are getting less and less frequent).
This will be a key moment towards Lemmy’s growth or decline. Especially in non-tech/meme/politics communities, it’s so easy for the only poster be a single person who is posting daily, and who then simply runs out of content. Maybe the solution is for each frequent poster to post non-daily on several different communities. Anyway, check out !fedigrow@lemm.ee, @Blaze@reddthat.com has started posting a weekly thread on “How is your niche community doing?”
I’ll check it out, thanks!
We added the scaled sort to help with that(it gives a boost to less active communities), but I don’t know if many people are using it.
I think one other thing that might help would be to adjust the “Active” sort. I believe it has some kind of hard-coded 2 day limit? So posts older than 2 days will not show up. The problem is that as the sort is working right now, it often displays posts that are 2 days old. This isn’t great for getting new content. It’d be nice if the “Active” sort (or any other other sorts) parameters could be configured somehow.
The active, hot, and scaled sort have that two day bump limit, but active uses the newest comment time for it’s algorithm, whereas hot uses the post creation time.
So the hot sort is better for new trending content, and active is better for topics with new comments.
active uses the newest comment time
I think this is what I don’t like about active sort. Just a single comment is all it needs to bump a highly upvoted post to the top. I feel like it should rather look at an aggregate of recent comments or something along those lines, so that a single comment doesn’t cause such a big effect. It’s kinda like if a single vote could move a post to the top.
Hot and Scaled are my main sorts. I alternate a couple of times a day. They get me the most interesting content.
I only check the first 3 pages of Active twice per day.
Edit: New is once per week and I generally regret it.
I miss the “Tales from…” subs. Tales from tech support was regular reading material for me for many years, and in general just having a place to commiserate with others in the same field as you is wonderful. The other ones also helped me be more concious of what I could do to keep myself from being a nuisance to other professionals like my doctor and pharmacist.
More niche, I miss the gunpla sub a lot. We have subs for model making and tabletop miniatures, but the gunpla community was very well run.
In general, I think the lack of moderation tools has made it difficult for communities to do regular “event” posts and the like which used to really help keep subs alive, guide discussions, and gave good examples of the type of content that fit. Like it’s a lot easier to start a new conversation at a party where everyone is talking than to be the first person to speak up in a silent room.
We’re definitely smaller than the Reddit gunpla sub, but I’m really enjoying the gunpla community on lemmy. Everyone’s chummy and welcoming. I’d love to see any you’ve built!
You want benzodiazepines? They are basically erase memory from [0.00 to 24.0] so I definitely wouldn’t recommend.
Big tiddy goth girls.
Did the lemmynsfw instance die or something?
♥️
Real issue
Honestly I wish there were less communities. I’ve said this before, but people treat Lemmy like late-stage Reddit, expecting niche communities for everything, and we end up with hundreds of communities with no (or one, if we’re lucky) active members.
This problem is then amplified by the fact that these niche communities are split even further across several instances, so our userbase ends up completely dissipated.
I would love to see users focus on a smaller number of more general-purpose communities. Of course, these should still be shared across instances, but I think we would benefit a lot from having, say, a “video games” community instead of 500 specific game communities.
As a side note as well, I don’t think we shouldn’t be “allowed” to create more niche communities (though if an instance admin wanted to regulate, that’s their call). I think this should be more of a user culture shift, if anything.
I disagree. There’s no problem with hundreds of niche communities. They create the opportunity for a real community to form simply by people subscribing to them. And if nobody posts on them, they are still there, not hurting anyone. But if someone does post on them, then everyone who is subscribed to that muni can see that post. So the worst case scenario is basically neutral, and the best case scenario is people have some posts in their feed for their niche interest.
Further, unlike at the outset of reddit, people are now really familiar with how thankless and time-consuming being a moderator is.
I’m not eager to have to manage a bunch of communities. If there’s a community that I wished existed, but I don’t care deeply enough to want to manage it, I’m not going to go out of my way to create it, which leaves the community non-existent. So I think having some ready-made communities from people willing to take on moderation duties is a good thing. Fewer people are willing to make the jump to be a moderator these days, and for good reason.
When I moved to Lemmy from Reddit (about a year ago) and wanted to look for the equivalent of r/Ireland here, I was met with about 5 or 6 different communities (spread across various instances). You couldn’t really call any of them active, occasionally someone would post a link to a news article but there was no engagement.
Things have improved since then but I definitely agree with your point.
I honestly don’t think Lemmy will function well without a way for identical communities across different instances could subscribe to eachother, allowing a single feed of information. This would stop the instances splitting the userbase.
Early Reddit had a subreddit for everything, but most were dormant. However as soon as you posted on it, enough people had it on their front page that you’d get a response. I think Lemmy feels very similar to how Reddit did 10 years ago, except many of the dead communities are totally dead.
This is a good point. Reddit originally had no communities. Then there were maybe a dozen, all picked by the admins… and already /r/Atheism was one of them, because that’s how the userbase went. People who don’t understand why such a community was necessary do not remember living through 90s / 00s American culture.
I’d create them if it wasn’t so difficult to host my own Lemmy instance
Most smaller instances will let you make a new community.
Getting people to subscribe, that’s your problem.
