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™””“”
Even though I’m disabled and can’t work, I don’t have the time or the energy to maintain something like that
The culture is not conducive here; Lemmings have no chill.
“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
Which one is that?
Edit: upon re-reading, i had misunderstood you.
There is no specific niche community I was talking about, I meant that any time I look for a niche interest (outside computers), it’s a ghost town. Especially if it’s for something local.
Is there any way we could talk about the niche communities, and promote them all at one place. I know it’s already there but I don’t remember where, it’s clearly a broken system.
A community dedicated to all the niche communities, I like this. A post a day highlighting various ones or where people can announce the ones they’ve created. This is a good idea to at least spread the word of their existence
Making the community doesn’t mean it has any activity. There’s tons of communities already made for a bunch of niche topics. None of them are being posted in. There’s also communities that aren’t niches that also lack activity.
!eldenring@lemmy.world only has about 3 active users, not including myself. The DLC is still pretty new and it’s a massively popular game.
Have you promoted it on !newcommunities@lemmy.world ? Seems strange to have such low activity while !stardewvalley@lemm.ee and !factorio@lemmy.world are quite active
Yea, I really want to see Elden Ring community thrive.
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.
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
We need better discoverable tools. I subscribed to the community
Welcome!
😄😁👋
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.
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?
Lemmy Explorer will do it…I think. “Newest publish time” sort is what you’re looking for, I think.
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.
whoa, Lemmy explorer is a great resource, thanks!
That would certainly help.
The thing is, communities need people. People who post in the community. Most new communities get a few members, a handful of posts, and then just die.
Counterpoint: Sometimes you can kickstart a community that you want to see just by consistently posting content. !science_memes@mander.xyz is my favourite example – it was essentially one person who created that entire community (and it’s since been diversifying somewhat – at least there’s traction in the comments).
But to reinforce your point: I did !spacemusic@lemmy.ca and tried to do the same thing, but it sort of petered out. But it’s way way more niche.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. Just engage with the content you like and build some places for content you’d like to see.
We’re complaining because we don’t want to be the ones to post, lol.
A phenomenon I’ve seen on Lemmy a lot is all of a sudden the All feed will be pages on end of the same user posting in the same community I’ve never heard of before. They get blocked. Spread that traffic out. You want people to go “oh there’s a community for that now” not “Oh my god will you comprehensively shut up?!” Lemmy.nsfw is often guilty of this.
Right now on the community for the Satisfactory game, almost all of the traffic is a guy posting “Day 44 of posting screenshots every day until I get bored.” That community is as good as dead. When it’s almost entirely one guy’s vomit pile, it’s as good as dead.
Don’t over-post.
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.
On PieFed, although I’m not sure what I think about it, posts with more than one user-defined threshold will get auto-collapsed, and then a second such threshold allows it to be hidden entirely.
So two people with opposing preferences could browse the same community but see it differently. The one wanting to see everything being allowed to do so - rather than that being the arbitrary decision of a mod (team), and the content hidden away in a mod log somewhere else, mostly inaccessible. Whereas the one who didn’t want to “waste” their time, and rather trusting the feedback of the community, could have those collapsed or hidden if they so choose.
This allows democratization of the modding process: every voter is equally a mod as the next. Or maybe some trusted members more so than others? (But if so, it can’t be TOO much higher than the others, or it could become overwhelming)
The major pitfall I see is if votes are allowed outside of the community, then it’s vulnerable to being brigaded easily by a larger outside force.
Still, it’s fascinating to see these experiments actually happen in that software that is available right now! e.g. on PieFed.social.
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.
Post something and see if you can stir up activity?
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.
Like you’ve been shown that there’s no simple answer over and over again here, but one problem I face hasn’t been mentioned. What if I want to subscribe to communities that I can’t participate in? Not every community is about hobbies, some is people talking about their life which is totally unlike mine and I like to read that. One I always pick as an example is r/arrangedmarriage. I love(d) reading that subreddit to explore a world that is so foreign to me. I’m a white woman from Europe as far removed from marriage as one could be on this earth. Why should someone follow an c/arrangedmarriage I of all people created and mod? Not everyone joins niche communities because they are directly relevant to their life.
whining about whining. classic!
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.
!casualconversation@lemm.ee can help too
This probably has a much higher accuracy rate.
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.
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
!stardewvalley@lemm.ee got pretty active in a few days
Isn’t that game one of the most successful and popular games of the decade? If that didn’t get traffic here it’d be absolute shambles
There are topics here I imagine would get traffic, like a community for sharing hilariously bad code, or a popular video game, etc.
But if your niche strays from the handful of common lemming niches, then you’re kind of out of luck.
oh “online community” , sorry I think I’ve misunderstood this whole thing. I mean, I don’t even know what a GenZ are. Is that, like, doing the emails? https://youtu.be/jK-ZRxeJIiU?t=14
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
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.
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.
That popup idea is something that could work, and something that one could suggest on Lemmy’s github for implementation.
Kbin had a cool feature where you could see other subs where a link was reposted to, was great for finding what’s active or dead.
Wish that one made it to Lemmy.
That’s already the case on the Lemmy web UI and lost og the apps
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.
Who gonna operate the sinkpissers community
