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™””“”
And then post it in New Communities and other boards like it to advertise it!
Lemmy is my niche community
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?
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.
We need better discoverable tools. I subscribed to the community
Welcome!
😄😁👋
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
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.
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.
Can recommend. Sometimes it does really well, sometimes it doesn’t. Its worth a try anytime anyways
Yes! It is worth a try!
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.
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.
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
Y=x^2 lmao
The comments on that post genuinely made my day.
Ps. Not to complain but -x²
Damnit
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!
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.
The funny thing is, if you don’t fit into the culture (or even just disagree with moderation) people tell you to go start your own. Which is like telling you to go sit in a corner by yourself.
That one comment on the asklemmy post radicalised my man.
i think we’ll be feeling the ramifications of that one post for quite a while…
Yeah im furiuos!!!
“Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder, but don’t nobody wanna lift no heavy-ass weights.”
Ronnie Coleman
lol like they’d ever actually upvote.
Except this link doesn’t work properly /c/books , until it does lemmy is broken, the fediverse is broken, lemmy is not really federated.
Not sure whether you’re being facetious or if you genuinely don’t know, but you link communities with an exclamation point.
!books
If you want to be absolutely sure you point to a community on a specific instance, just include the instance
Their other comment elaborates on this more:
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
They want a link like /c/books to work like multireddits did on reddit to collect together books-related communities for improved browsing and discovery.
That’s just /c/books on one server.
When say /c/books, I mean all of them, not /c/books@lemmy.ml
Until then, expect nearly all communities to dry on the vine.
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.
I wish instead that people would post in the general communities first, then spin off into a new community if there is interest.
Like, we don’t need a whole community for the new Dragon Age game or whatever, but we do have a games community that would benefit from the post. Then if there are 20 Dragon Age posts every day it could obviously support it’s own community.
So true, we were trying to shape lemmy into reddit so much that we skipped few steps like this which even reddit had to go through.
Hey speaking of, while !games@lemmy.world is a great example, if you’re not finding similar communities for your interest, feel free to post over in !general@lemmy.world for what Zombiepirate’s describing.
Hobby without a community around here? Just not really sure if an existing community is open to non-news posts? General’s got ya covered.
This. All of us Reddit Refugees (me included) fucked up when we arrived and put the cart before the horse. Lemmy is like a small town; you may simply not get all the specific communities you want, but there’s probably somebody with a similar enough interest that they’ll talk to you about the stuff you like, and they probably have things that you would like to talk about if you saw it. Higher-level categories should do fine unless and until a certain type of content starts to annoy other users by its sheer prevalence.
As someone else said, Lemmy is the niche community.
Yeah, there’s no use in speed-running Reddit.
Let’s make our own thing.
I’ve been pondering orbs, don’t know what y’all are doing.
communities require people. if ur the only one posting its not a community
If you are consistently posting content there is a high probability others will join
Making a community also implies moderating it, doesn’t it? I would understand that there are people who just want to see and post things they like and not have to be aware of banning users or deleting unwanted posts.
I say that because I am part of those people, moderating content is hard.
I don’t want to say that it is easy, because it is actuall effort you have to put in, but moderating a community, especally if it is very niche and small is not that hard.
I can understand people not wanting to do some stuff, but I much more respect “I don’t want to modding so I make a community and ask someone to be with me on a mod team when stuff is going to get overwhelming, and focus on other stuff within community” than “I dont want to do modding so I’m going to just sit there and wait while other people do it for me”
