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™””“”
I see this response all the time “create your own if you want to see niche communities and Reddit communities migrate here.” Well, if I have the bloody time to moderate, or even if I do, will there be many people? And if there are many people, do I have the time to moderate? What if there are mod bickering and drama?
The question is time. Does anyone else have the time to moderate and put up with BS inevitable with most communities?
I’ve been asking for a personal finance community for a while. The only US-based one I’ve found is on .ml, which…ew. I haven’t made one because I do not have the time to mod a big, popular sub like that one will hopefully become.
Buuuuut I got tired of waiting for someone else to do it so I made it: https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]
I’m sure it will be a shitshow but at least I tried.
Thank you for this!
communities require people. if ur the only one posting its not a community
If you are consistently posting content there is a high probability others will join
Who gonna operate the sinkpissers community
whining about whining. classic!
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.
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 a community also implies moderating it, doesn’t it? I would understand that there are people who just want to see and post things they like and not have to be aware of banning users or deleting unwanted posts.
I say that because I am part of those people, moderating content is hard.
I don’t want to say that it is easy, because it is actuall effort you have to put in, but moderating a community, especally if it is very niche and small is not that hard.
I can understand people not wanting to do some stuff, but I much more respect “I don’t want to modding so I make a community and ask someone to be with me on a mod team when stuff is going to get overwhelming, and focus on other stuff within community” than “I dont want to do modding so I’m going to just sit there and wait while other people do it for me”
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.
Hey speaking of, while [email protected] is a great example, if you’re not finding similar communities for your interest, feel free to post over in [email protected] 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.
[email protected] as well
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.
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 [email protected]. 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 [email protected]. Similar vibes.
This probably has a much higher accuracy rate.
[email protected] can help too
I would contribute to my niche community, but my foreskin was severed without my consent, so…
This did remind me to create a community for the one subreddit I used the most before I left reddit, r/jakeandamir. Thank you, I did that today!
Then post into the void until some other like-minded degenerate finds you. You need to create the meeting point!
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.
The epitome of the meme.
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.
[email protected] is the same. I’m quite surprised too, but I guess the Lemmy demographics is just not into professional sports
Lurkers complain where creators entertain
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.
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.
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
Isn’t that game one of the most successful and popular games of the decade? If that didn’t get traffic here it’d be absolute shambles
There are topics here I imagine would get traffic, like a community for sharing hilariously bad code, or a popular video game, etc.
But if your niche strays from the handful of common lemming niches, then you’re kind of out of luck.
oh “online community” , sorry I think I’ve misunderstood this whole thing. I mean, I don’t even know what a GenZ are. Is that, like, doing the emails? https://youtu.be/jK-ZRxeJIiU?t=14
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]
