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™””“”
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.
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
Well I might just might check it out this weekend. Thank you.
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.
I’ve moderated communities before. No thanks.
Yeah the level of effort to keep the community engaged and to moderate the content is a tough job and really only possible for people who are really dedicated.
Well, I’ve been trying to put some content on !fgc@lemmy.world and !mahjong@lemmy.nerdcore.social, but there’s been almost no engagement. I can’t imagine it’d be worth even trying to start communities for even more niche topics than that.
Clicking the “Create a Community” button doesn’t magically spawn an audience of people who share my hobbies and want to post about them.
The problem isn’t that they won’t create them, there’s insufficient biomass to populate them.
If I want to talk about a 5-year-old video game with myself, I’ll just open Notepad.
As @Zombiepirate@lemmy.world said in a comment here, we can use general communities to find “biomass needed” to populate small communities
Although I can see the point you are making, and I agree to some extent. I still think it is better to try
I totally agree, and I did try. It was just some kind of soul reposting things from Reddit and me.
Just how much biomass does a subthread really need?
Well, the sub in question had one person copying the articles from Reddit and me commenting on them. That was decidedly too few :)
Philosophically, I think you need enough engagement that there’s chat at least a few times a week in the group. Anything less than that and it’s closer to a search engine result than a community.
Feel free to drop a post on !oldgamers@lemmy.world if you want to talk old games.
The culture is not conducive here; Lemmings have no chill.
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.
The epitome of the meme.
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
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? 😁
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.
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.
I see this, and am upvoting:-).
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.
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.
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.
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.
During the initial mass migration from Reddit I got the impression a lot of people were starting communities on Lemmy that had been successful on Reddit but put no effort into them. I’ll bet there is a statistic yet to be figured out that says you need a million platform members before you can have enough members to sustain a niche community like c/gothcountry.
Problem is that Reddit won’t let people talk about alternatives, so it’s difficult to tell people about it. Lemmy also does not lend itself to following links if you’re not logged into that instance. So if you find a link to a community on a different instance you can’t comment or engage with it unless you go back through your own instance.
You can with ! links:
You can also paste a post link in your search bar to find it in your own instance
Even those that did, remain invisible. This link doesn’t work /c/books
Until the link /c/books shows any user, with only one click, the aggregate of all “books” communities in a single place, without subscribing or even logging in. Then lemmy will stagnate because it is failing to live up to its promise of federated decentralization
Both Mbin and PieFed have “categories”, so that you don’t need to search for and find communities at all - you can simply join like “memes”, underneath “Chillin”, and it’ll show all of them. You can fine-tune further, but hunting through All can be a thing of the past. So… it’s happening, not in Lemmy per se (yet) but in the wider Fediverse it’s already here. See it yourself in action at e.g. https://piefed.social/ (3 horizontal bars -> Topics).
Interesting, thanks I will check those out!
whining about whining. classic!
Who gonna operate the sinkpissers community
I would contribute to my niche community, but my foreskin was severed without my consent, so…
Been posting to “Europe” since forever. Still only a fraction of users compared to that other site. About 3000 monthly I believe. Driving engagement is harder than it seems.
Yep, be the change you want to see in the world.
Also, making communities is fun! I made !cartographyanarchy@lemm.ee and it is booming thanks to several lemmings who I got to post consistently. Shout out to thepiccardmanuever.
Not for free.
Lurkers complain where creators entertain
A lurker never complains. That is why they are lurkers.
I lurker is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.
You never know a real lurker is there. None of us are lurkers.
Oh but some do create very helpful content like “repost!” comments to help people seeing old content from getting embarrassed by not realizing all discussion about that content has been done already.
Some try to improve stories by adding claims of applause or a famous person offering a sum of money, probably because it’s silly to imagine such embellishments and they like joining in on the fun.
Yes putting in the same amount of effort as the reposter.
lol like they’d ever actually upvote.
