Kind of a companion thread to the recent one on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com asking people which community there were missing.

I had a quick look, and most of those seem to be niches that can’t be filled until we reach a higher population.

There is still maybe some potential improvement about some less well-known community that other people are interested in and that could some additional activity.

I try to help to make less known communities known with the regular threads on !newcommunities@lemmy.world (now moving to !communitypromo@lemmy.ca ), but there is probably only a level of detail we have to stop at with 47k monthly active users.

One example is !jrpg@lemmy.zip, it seems reasonable active, and is probably a better compromise than having each game having its own community.

Similar with !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works, or !showsandmovies@lemm.ee. I posted a thread about Ted Lasso a few days ago, it got some nice comments, but probably not enough to have a full fledged dedicated community.

    • Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      25 days ago

      1.) I believe that the discovery is bad and this is why I’m working on !lemmydirectory@lemmy.dbzer0.com where the goal is to index the communities for people to discover something to follow even if they weren’t looking for that specifically. I plan to push a huge update to it somewhere next month.

      I think that some community (users, not mods) managed recommendation system where you recommend related communities for you to display on the sidebar would be great too. But that’s just an another idea that would never see the light of the day in development. Some communities have sidebars where mods link to related communities but it’s really not flexible enough to link communities to each other easily.

      2.) Missing enough people is definitely the biggest problem there because even if people knew about the communities someone still needs to populate them and ideally organically instead of it being 1-2 chronic posters.

      3.) Revisiting expectations is definitely needed but generalising communities too much is not ideal because if I want to follow one thing but not the other then I would be stuck with lots of content I don’t care about. There needs to be some middle ground on that. I have a few imaginary communities on themes I enjoy and mod a few others to help out with moderation. I don’t want them to be merged into one blob without a theme going on. This is also why I and the other mod refused to move our communities to !imaginary@reddthat.com which doesn’t focus on our preferred niches. But depending on how post tags get implemented in lemmy I would be willing to move to your community. But my requirements would be high like being able to subscribe to only posts from a specific community with specific tags and being able to easily filter posts in community view. Also blacklisting. Basically allowing you to have things in one community but being able to interact with posts as if they were separate ones.

      4.) I also think that mod tools and community settings to protect the community and give it direction are severely lacking. For example something like this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5360

      5.) Not being able to create your own custom feeds is also a massive problem because you can’t split your feed into types like memes/news/discussions/meta etc. Low traffic communities get buried in your feed when you subscribe to them making things bad for the growth. And because everything is mixed together it makes things a bit less pleasant to browse as well. If I could use different feeds for different moods I would definitely interact with lemmy and content I like more because it would be easily available.

      And some other issues that I’m not remembering right now.

      • scsi@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        25 days ago

        5.) Not being able to create your own custom feeds is also a massive problem because you can’t split your feed into types like memes/news/discussions/meta etc.

        This is a big one for me - on R, one can create a “multireddit” (collection view of multiple subreddits in one combined feed) without subscribing to any of the communities; for example I have one called “news” that’s 10+ news subreddits which I do not subscribe to; subscriptions are for my actual real direct interests only. Subscribing to news specific communities can quickly overrun and bury your Subscribed feed.

        Lemmy as a software platform is missing the entire concept of a multireddit and detracts from it’s usefulness for certain types of users such as myself; I still get most of my daily news from R and sadly gaming communities did not migrate en masse to lemmyverse so they’re all still on R.

  • fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    25 days ago

    Community discovery 100% needs to be improved somehow. No matter how many popular posts you make you will heavily struggle getting the ball rolling, if you ever do.

    This practically guarantees the death of niches, which is [obviously] not good for the fediverse as a whole.

      • FundMECFS@slrpnk.netEnglish
        2·
        25 days ago

        My reflex moving over was to subscribe to everything I’m interested in and never use all, because I’ve never used it on reddit.

        This created a problem where since lemmy’s sorting all basically sort by most popular (except scaled but that sort is problematic for other reasons), I basically only saw the meme and news communities I subscribed to on my feed and the niche stuff never made it.

        I know @Aurelius@lemmy.world is working on an algorithmic alternative !quiblr@lemmy.world but it’s not got support on any apps.

        • Microw@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          23 days ago

          I usually use scaled for my subscribed feed and it works decently. Recently was advised to try out “newest comments” sorting for the subscribed feed and I like that even more!

        • Die4Ever@programming.devEnglish
          1·
          25 days ago

          have you tried Scaled sort? I use Scaled for my subscribed feed and it does a great job showing new posts in niche communities

      • fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        25 days ago

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule influences this heavily imo

        I think it’s both. On latin for example i have 120 users (35 are lemmy federate bots) but i’m the only one posting there, despite some posts getting a lot of upvotes or comments.

        This can heavily discourage mods and force them to quit which kills the community.

        • JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          23 days ago

          I’m coming up on 1,000 subscribers, 500 posts, and 1.5+yrs of content creation in my bandes dessinées sublemmy, with myself being responsible for maybe 85-90% of total content creation. Your concerns are real and valid IMO.

          Soon I plan to set up a bot to post small, ‘drip-like’ content every other day, supplementing the off-days with my beefier content, which are generally small reviews and content roundups. I guess my point is that it’s good to keep trying different techniques out, asking this and other communities for ideas, and having requisite patience.

          Also, I think light-handed advertising across various platforms probably helps. Imgur and Reddit have worked okay so far, but frankly I need someone to help with other social media joints. That’s something an active mod could potentially help with…

      • MajorHavoc@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        25 days ago

        Oh! Today I learned about community promo. Yeah, I guess we could use awareness raising about the existence of that community. Sounds like an awesome resource.

  • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catEnglish
    0·
    25 days ago
    1. Just like default theming, I think it suffers from a problem of “it works for me [the developer] so who cares.” Community discovery could be so much better. As far as I know, PieFed is the only project that’s actually looking at it from first principles instead of “here’s a totally useless “trending” box, we good right?”
    2. To me, the root cause analysis is that the nature of Lemmy’s design makes it tough to customize. You can’t have a custom sort order. You can’t (easily) have an admin change what the “trending” box is based on, or whether it exists at all. I think it leaves things in a weird state where a handful of Lemmy developers have to do everything, instead of needing to focus on a core set of robust functionality and letting a little ecosystem develop of customizations and tweaks with a tight feedback loop between developers, admins, and users.
    3. It honestly could be as simple as a box that assembles the last five posts from !newcommunities@lemmy.world or !communities@ponder.cat. Do something. I think it would honestly be super motivating if someone posted to !newcommunities and then saw their community start to show up in the box. You’d need to moderate some spam of course.
    4. I actually don’t think the “please federate my community everywhere” tools are as necessary as they seem like they would be. I’ve always seen from even a single post to one of the promo communities, it seems like the community pretty much goes everywhere.
    5. I think a lot of the “niche communities go quiet” problem could be solved with better interoperation with Mastodon. It’s fine if only 3 people on Lemmy talk about JRPGs, if they can talk to a whole community external to Lemmy about it, on Lemmy. That was the whole point of ActivityPub, but unfortunately ActivityPub isn’t all that well-designed, so it’s a lot harder to make happen than it should be.

    Those are my thoughts, in no particular order.

  • Bassman1805@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    25 days ago

    The expectation that a social media that optimistically has 0.1% the user base of reddit, can support the same level of community fragmentation, is not realistic. I’ve been here long enough to see numerous failed attempts at starting a community for My Favorite Niche, rather than just posting about it in More General Community. You usually get a single “welcome” post by the creator, and then nothing more. If you’re lucky, the creator will make a small handful of their own posts before giving up.

    Post about your favorite TV show in a tv/movies community, don’t make a new one just for your show. You’ll get way more engagement

        • StrongHorseWeakNeigh@lemm.eeEnglish
          0·
          25 days ago

          I think it’s a comm where some guy posts whatever they’re interested in at the moment. Kind of like c/Gondaily

          • scsi@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            25 days ago

            nod the point was (in fun) to exemplify not doing what the GP comment to this thread was talking about; here we have a positive example of a user creating a single space to post any/all of their “niche” (eye of the beholder) content, rather than creating tiny communities for each interest. It was a light-hearted comment “see, like this”. :) (disclaimer: I’m subscribed)

            • Vespair@lemm.eeEnglish
              2·
              23 days ago

              And I think this is how people should start thinking of Lemmy communities maybe, or at least as an option for Lemmy communities; to be less like subreddit ls and more like personal pages frankly more akin to Myspace. Part of the appeal of Lemmy, to me at least, is the decentralization and reclamation of some level of ownership. So maybe lemmy is less a place where you go to join c/deathmetal and c/crotchet and c/vintagesmurfpornography, but instead it’s a place where you start c/yourusername and declare it your personal shrine to needlepoint, cannibal corpse, and blue cartoon-fuckery.

              But I also smoke weed, so I might just be having a moment