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™””“”
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
[email protected] got pretty active in a few days
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 [email protected]
And then post it in New Communities and other boards like it to advertise it!
The culture is not conducive here; Lemmings have no chill.
Yep, be the change you want to see in the world.
Also, making communities is fun! I made [email protected] and it is booming thanks to several lemmings who I got to post consistently. Shout out to thepiccardmanuever.
I would contribute to my niche community, but my foreskin was severed without my consent, so…
lol like they’d ever actually upvote.
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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 not 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 [email protected] 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.
Damnit
And still, the community I started ( [email protected] ) 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.
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.
Feel free to drop a post on [email protected] if you want to talk old games.
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.
As @[email protected] 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.
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!!!
Can recommend. Sometimes it does really well, sometimes it doesn’t. Its worth a try anytime anyways
Yes! It is worth a try!
“Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder, but don’t nobody wanna lift no heavy-ass weights.”
Ronnie Coleman
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.
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
That popup idea is something that could work, and something that one could suggest on Lemmy’s github for implementation.
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.
New user here. Where should I create my community? Are there servers or groups or something that I should review first? I don’t know the difference between a server and .world or .ml or whatever.
.world and .ml are servers. I’d recommend choosing a server related to your topic (programming.zone if it’s comp sci related, for example), and try to avoid piling into the largest ones (.world and .ml, etc.).
Thank you very much for the response
Is reddthat a server? Should all of the communities inside a server be related? I’m asking because I want to create communities but I don’t know where it’s appropriate to do so. For example, if I want to create a sub for venting about family, is it okay to do that on any server? Or do I have to go digging to find the “correct” server?
Yes, you could create a community on reddthat (if that server allows for new communities to be created and hasn’t disabled that feature).
No, they don’t need to be all related. A server admin likely would tell you “hey please don’t create this one here, because this server’s focus is xy”.
That’s more info than I’ve been able to find anywhere on Lemmy lol thank you very much
You’re welcome!
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 mean, really, I just want other people to be moderating it even if I’m the only one posting stuff. Ain’t nobody got time for dat!
For real, there are people who will volunteer to do that, to help a community get off the ground. See [email protected].
