Personally, I think news and memes are already covered and aren’t in critical need of more posters.

I’d say whatever you are interested in should be what you contribute. Make a little corner of the fediverse for yourself and then show it off to everyone.

If it’s something niche, I’d suggest posting to the niche community and then cross-posting in a larger, relevant community.

I also think news and memes are the exact two things we have in abundance. And I mean we already got a million other online places to read the news. What I like is the more personal things. What people genuinely care about. Their hobby projects, what you soldered/programmed/knitted/drew/… favourite computer games, books, fandoms…

I think one of the great things about platforms who have more content than we do is, how you can find stuff about every niche interest, including people to talk to. Thely’ll talk about doing hobby horsing, painting minifigures, soldering lightning sensors, producing music with Free Software. And as a user you can read about all kinds of fascinating, sometimes weird stuff… You can easily find similar-minded people within the communities. I think we could use a bit more of that. Pretty much everything that isn’t news or just copied from some other place.

We already have some of that. For example I see people post nice pictures they took. Of animals, or from spectacular locations. The dull men’s club has a lot of genuine stuff from people’s lives… And I can find people to talk to about Star Trek and some of my computer and electronics interests. I think the threaded part of the Fediverse is ideal for that kind of content. But we kinda need a broader bandwidth of stuff. And not only content, but the community of people who care and talk about it.

Don’t ask us what we want to see. If we want it, we’ll add it — to our instance. For example, Lemmy.world has a Music comm, and so do a couple others. However, dbzer0 did not. Music is one of my passions in life, so I made the Music comm on the instance I’m on.

Think about what you want to contribute to the Fediverse, and see if your instance (kbin.earth) has it. If not, consider comms that provide it on other instances. You might be better off just contributing to one of those, if everyone federates. The reason I did not join Lemmy.world’s Music comm has nothing to do with the people there (I’m sure they’re fine folks) but more to do with the beef between some of that instance’s admins and some of the people at dbzer0. I don’t want to get involved in fediverse/instance drama, but rather, I do like dbzer0, so I figured my efforts would be better served making and maintaining the Music comm on my local instance. So a conversation like that is what you would need to have with yourself, and with anyone you would want to work with on a comm. (Sometimes it’s good to have a team. I’m more of a lone wolf.)

I feel like if you’re trying to add things that others want, it’s not something you’ll be passionate about and you’d be apt to give up. Maybe not. I don’t know you or your energy. But, that’s what’s worked for me.

But, as far as what I’d like to see on your slice of the fediverse (I’m guessing you mean your instance), nothing really. I mean, I browse /all, so I see everything that gets posted, unless it gets moderated before I see it. I don’t bother with modlogs. So, there’s nothing I’m really looking for, per se.

Positive news.

News that Google News doesn’t surface.

Niche blogs. Not substacks.

Niche communities! We need more of them.

Whatever you do, connect this place with other things you love, do it constantly like someone knitting as they watch tv.

Link to interesting places and ideas!

I wanna see what people are passionate about. The beauty of Reddit is that you can find so much info about niche topics. Make a community about what you’re into and actually contribute to it.

Thanks all for your thoughts. Super helpful! I’m going to give some thought to things I can contribute to smaller communities given my offline interests.