Like others, I came over when Reddit was banning 3rd party apps. Many communities were being started and I wanted to help. So I chose one community to form here and try and grow. And we did! There was a time a short while in the little KC Chiefs community was in the top 100 communities on Lemmy world. I knew that wouldn’t last that we would be outpaced by many more broad appeal communities but I didn’t predict the reverse in engagement growth that has come. Stagnation sure, I didn’t think Lemmy was going to surpass reddit for a long while yet, but not the barren communities of today. Meme communities and the “small gripe” adjacent communities are doing fine, but it seems all others have shrunk. I tried to keep the Kerbal Space Program community active for a bit but had to return to the official forums and even subreddit for discussion. The post I made in the Go community here remains the only post in the community.
A platform led by a CEO who edits comments of users, lies about other professionals and then double downs on the lie when proven to be a liar can’t be trusted. And in general I prefer the decentralized open source backbone of Lemmy to the ad ridden, rage bait and bug filled Reddit. I’d love for this to be my full time home for discussing my niche interests but that’s not possible without others engaging with the content.
I posted a lot in the beginning, tried to comment a lot too but now it feels like talking to myself when I make a new post in the community I started and get few or no responses. What can be done? Community specific advice is nice, but I’m looking more for Lemmy World level solutions as I’m sure there’s many many other niche communities I’m not apart of experiencing the same thing.
IMO, where lemmy is right now. Niche communities are counter productive. Especially as there is often 3 times the same niche communities on 3 different instances.
Try to talk about your niche content in a larger community. Talk about Oshi no ko in a generic manga/anime community. Try to talk about Kult RPG in a generic rpg community. Talk about french politics in a general France/Europe community.
Today we have generic community with like 10 posts a day and under them a bunch of niches with a post per week. Uf you move these posts to the general community above you now get 15 posts a day.
Content is what drags users, not yet another niche community.
Lemmy is still on the verge of usability, there is few very engaged user who make a large fraction of the content. Keeping it alive, but if in 6 month they have less time some /c will deperish
Unfortunately some niches don’t fit with other, larger communities. Simracing, for example, makes no sense in gaming communities, but also makes no sense in car communities.
I’m spending more and more time back on Reddit because that’s where the community is. Otherwise it’s just empty with the occasional post here.
Unfortunately some niches don’t fit with other, larger communities. Simracing, for example, makes no sense in gaming communities, but also makes no sense in car communities.
Do you also enjoy other non-sim racing games? You might post about some of those and then if the opportunity rises also bring up the other simracing games you’re into and direct some folks to a simracing community that way.
It’s roundabout, but I think that’s often how one makes paths to more niche subjects.
I do, but I don’t post about them. I don’t like making posts and try to avoid doing so at all costs.
Other gaming pretty much has nothing in common with Simracing. It doesn’t use any of the same hardware, tends to take a lot of money to get started in and isn’t something for casual players.
I don’t like generic communities overall. I find them boring and tending to lack in creativity. The reason I liked Reddit so much was I didn’t need to interact with other subjects, I could find my niche and stay there without needing to deal with other gaming groups.
Especially as there is often 3 times the same niche communities on 3 different instances.
This is why I haven’t tried to do anything with !fire@lemmy.world even though I asked to take it over. !fire@lemmy.ml had already gotten going a little bit, so I’d rather direct folks there.
Content is what drags users, not yet another niche community.
Absolutely not, I had to make a post last week to find something that’s niche in reddit and not on lemmy because it had a sub and lemmy didn’t have a community on it. I always make posts on any niche community if I have to. I don’t mind whether it’s dead or not. I am sure many people feel that way too.
Well, but that basically means I’d have to rely on different platforms if I want to post and discuss, say, niche music that’d just be buried immediately in the usual “popular” music communities (that often have a slightly rockist slant).
Even on reddit, the ambient music or IDM communities are fairly small.
If the community is so large that your post is immediately buried, it’s large enough for a subcommunity.
However, most communities on the threadiverse are not that large. In that case, fragmenting the tiny communities even more just hides your post from the users who might be interested but are not subscribed to a niche subcommunity of a small community.
Hmm I get your point, but on the other hand, I suppose nowadays many people are just used to look for a niche community … and finding it. So it’s not a huge surprise if the first reaction is disappointment when you don’t find anything like it or just an empty community.
Continue to spread Lemmy on other sites. Post Lemmy memes on Reddit, Instagram, etc. and be sure to include the original Lemmy link.
I appreciate all you admins here, I really do. Far more transparent than from Reddit and you do it all without making profit.
The pinned post to Lemmy World sounded like (to me) that you recognize a lot of people signed up, made communities, and then have abandoned Lemmy leaving a lot of ghost communities that you all want to clean up. Totally understandable, especially with all the legal considerations about leaving online spaces unmoderated.
It just got me thinking about how Lemmy has changed, and how I really want it to succeed. I can try and follow this suggestion, but I almost feel like for a lot of the more niche interests, Lemmy will sort of just be in a holding mode until Reddit inevitably fumbles the ball again leading to a new migration, this time with a more clear destination.
Here’s some things Lemmy could potentially implement:
- a default sort that favors smaller communities
- better onboarding for new users that guides them into discovering new communities
- giving recommendations to other similar communities
The sorting algorithm changes are what I’ve been waiting for forever. A bit disappointed it’s taking so long. I basically never see many communities I’m subbed to. I miss having a local city community. It has me constantly thinking of just dealing with Reddit’s bullshit, cause if it’s not big news or memes, Lemmy ain’t cutting it.
The sorting algorithm changes are what I’ve been waiting for forever. A bit disappointed it’s taking so long. I basically never see many communities I’m subbed to.
On that last point, are those communities fairly active? I’ve noticed similar but when I check the communities I’m subscribed to, it turns out it’s largely because they’re less active than those communities I’m seeing more posts from.
Even more apparent when I switch to viewing only my subscribed communities feed.
a default sort that favors smaller communities
Someone should make an issue on that in the github!
a default sort that favors smaller communities
the Scaled sort option is in v0.19.0, you can see a preview of this on https://voyager.lemmy.ml/
part of the reason why some communities stick and some dont is because the type of people who were willing to jump to lemmy. Users who jumped to lemmy generally were more tech forward, privacy forward, or was part of some ostracized community not very welcome on reddit, as the typical casual user does not care for site politics.
its really hard to start a small community with one main poster, and requires a few to get the ball rolling. its a game of converting those in the niche communities to make the jump
I personally made the jump, caz I’m trying to be more conscious about my digital life. When I hopped on here, asked this and that, read/wrote comments, the community was just so much better (still is). This wholesome, selfless, helpful bunch in one place. I really can’t care about not being a terraria fandom alive here (one of my most active subs for a while). I stay for the people.
also lemmy memes suck, wtf guys, post funny things pls
i think lemmy isnt a bastion of hope for media its just another thing to doom scroll on. people think theyre fighting the good fight because theyre doom scrolling another app. stop thinking about the company exploiting you. youre literally exploiting yourself by wasting so much time scrolling.
this app will likely never grow because theres no necessity this fills except for niche linux bros. at least theres a place for those weirdos to congregate now.
Yeah I figured go/baduk would be a hard community to start, which is one of the reasons I chose the Chiefs.
But this isn’t just the difficulty of growing a community from a small start, this is seeing a community grow then shrink. Going through many niche communities the post rate and comment rate seems down across the board, outside of the biggest communities on the site. Combatting a shrinking community seems even more difficult than growing from a small start.
There are a few niche communities that are doing well here. The Trekkies that meme over at risa, the NCD crowd and their Military-Industrial Complex fetish, and the meme community in general is fairly healthy and active.
But I agree with you that there isn’t that critical mass that Reddit has that allows organic niche growth to occur. We’re simply too small. Even small Reddit communities like /r/Kenshi (131k) or /r/Factorio (347k) have more subscribers than the entirety of all Lemmy instances (60k). It’s impossible to compete when there is such a mismatch of scale, especially against behemoths like /r/funny with subscriber bases in the millions.
What can we do? Just keep making this place our home. Post interesting things you find on the Internet, copypasta memes, that sort of stuff. I don’t know if it’ll grow it but if enough of us do this it won’t stagnate.
