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™””“”
I see this response all the time “create your own if you want to see niche communities and Reddit communities migrate here.” Well, if I have the bloody time to moderate, or even if I do, will there be many people? And if there are many people, do I have the time to moderate? What if there are mod bickering and drama?
The question is time. Does anyone else have the time to moderate and put up with BS inevitable with most communities?
“Why complain about lacking a community when you can create your own ghost town”
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.
Feel free to drop a post on !oldgamers@lemmy.world if you want to talk old games.
Lemmy is my niche community
And then post it in New Communities and other boards like it to advertise it!
I would contribute to my niche community, but my foreskin was severed without my consent, so…
You just reminded me to post in this new community I joined recently, so thank you.
I will not whine about the lack of this niche community, because both c/Indiana and c/Indiana@midwest.social exist, but boy do I wish they were even close to as active as r/Indiana was when I was on Reddit.
There is just not a good place to discuss state politics that I can find and I learned a lot through discussion.
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”
I’ve moderated communities before. No thanks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder if that’s related to a user base that skews heavily toward techies.
I think you clicked the wrong comment to reply to.
I did, thanks.
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 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
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?
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?
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.
What are you talking about all of you here man! Spending a sec of your time on a community about a subject that you are interested is a really great task for you? That’s lame and lazy and shows lack of any vision
You should already brainstorming to make communities more innovative and better than reddit
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.
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.
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.
