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™””“”
Yep, be the change you want to see in the world.
Also, making communities is fun! I made !cartographyanarchy@lemm.ee and it is booming thanks to several lemmings who I got to post consistently. Shout out to thepiccardmanuever.
Lurkers complain where creators entertain
A lurker never complains. That is why they are lurkers.
I lurker is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.
You never know a real lurker is there. None of us are lurkers.
Oh but some do create very helpful content like “repost!” comments to help people seeing old content from getting embarrassed by not realizing all discussion about that content has been done already.
Some try to improve stories by adding claims of applause or a famous person offering a sum of money, probably because it’s silly to imagine such embellishments and they like joining in on the fun.
Yes putting in the same amount of effort as the reposter.
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.
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.
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.
We’re complaining because we don’t want to be the ones to post, lol.
“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
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
Thanks! I’m currently going through my hobbies and I’m gonna start posting and subbing to all of them.
You’re right, I should be posting more if I want engagement.
This is the lifecycle of internet forums
“I’m sick of this place, I’m going somewhere new!” > “This place is deserted” > “Let’s diversify and get more users” > “There are more users but they are all posting content I’m not interested in” > “I’m sick of this place, I’m going somewhere new!”
I’ve been through at least half a dozen such cycles, it’s just a normal part of life when you live vicariously through an ethernet cable. Lemmy will grow, get old, go to shit, and die, and half the population will move somewhere else. Probably Pylon.
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.
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.
How do I create a community on Sync? Can’t find a button for that.
Then post into the void until some other like-minded degenerate finds you. You need to create the meeting point!
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.
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.
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!
Y=x^2 lmao
The comments on that post genuinely made my day.
Ps. Not to complain but -x²
Damnit
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.
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.
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.
The epitome of the meme.
