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™””“”
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.
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
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.
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.
Yeah that is very fair. However, you can say “I’m sitting in my own corner, with blackjack and hookers”
Y=x^2 lmao
The comments on that post genuinely made my day.
Ps. Not to complain but -x²
Damnit
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.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
I think you clicked the wrong comment to reply to.
I did, thanks.
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.
!football@lemmy.world is the same. I’m quite surprised too, but I guess the Lemmy demographics is just not into professional sports
The epitome of the meme.
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.
!patientgamers@sh.itjust.works has a larger population
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.
“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
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.
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.
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.
Yea, I really want to see Elden Ring community thrive.
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
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.
Mostly stuff with beans.
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.
!casualconversation@lemmy.world as well
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.
whining about whining. classic!
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.
That one comment on the asklemmy post radicalised my man.
Yeah im furiuos!!!
i think we’ll be feeling the ramifications of that one post for quite a while…
Which one?
Who gonna operate the sinkpissers community
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.
!casualconversation@lemm.ee can help too
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!
