Like others, I came over when Reddit was banning 3rd party apps. Many communities were being started and I wanted to help. So I chose one community to form here and try and grow. And we did! There was a time a short while in the little KC Chiefs community was in the top 100 communities on Lemmy world. I knew that wouldn’t last that we would be outpaced by many more broad appeal communities but I didn’t predict the reverse in engagement growth that has come. Stagnation sure, I didn’t think Lemmy was going to surpass reddit for a long while yet, but not the barren communities of today. Meme communities and the “small gripe” adjacent communities are doing fine, but it seems all others have shrunk. I tried to keep the Kerbal Space Program community active for a bit but had to return to the official forums and even subreddit for discussion. The post I made in the Go community here remains the only post in the community.
A platform led by a CEO who edits comments of users, lies about other professionals and then double downs on the lie when proven to be a liar can’t be trusted. And in general I prefer the decentralized open source backbone of Lemmy to the ad ridden, rage bait and bug filled Reddit. I’d love for this to be my full time home for discussing my niche interests but that’s not possible without others engaging with the content.
I posted a lot in the beginning, tried to comment a lot too but now it feels like talking to myself when I make a new post in the community I started and get few or no responses. What can be done? Community specific advice is nice, but I’m looking more for Lemmy World level solutions as I’m sure there’s many many other niche communities I’m not apart of experiencing the same thing.
IMO, where lemmy is right now. Niche communities are counter productive. Especially as there is often 3 times the same niche communities on 3 different instances.
Try to talk about your niche content in a larger community. Talk about Oshi no ko in a generic manga/anime community. Try to talk about Kult RPG in a generic rpg community. Talk about french politics in a general France/Europe community.
Today we have generic community with like 10 posts a day and under them a bunch of niches with a post per week. Uf you move these posts to the general community above you now get 15 posts a day.
Content is what drags users, not yet another niche community.
Lemmy is still on the verge of usability, there is few very engaged user who make a large fraction of the content. Keeping it alive, but if in 6 month they have less time some /c will deperish
Especially as there is often 3 times the same niche communities on 3 different instances.
This is why I haven’t tried to do anything with [email protected] even though I asked to take it over. [email protected] had already gotten going a little bit, so I’d rather direct folks there.
Well, but that basically means I’d have to rely on different platforms if I want to post and discuss, say, niche music that’d just be buried immediately in the usual “popular” music communities (that often have a slightly rockist slant).
Even on reddit, the ambient music or IDM communities are fairly small.
If the community is so large that your post is immediately buried, it’s large enough for a subcommunity.
However, most communities on the threadiverse are not that large. In that case, fragmenting the tiny communities even more just hides your post from the users who might be interested but are not subscribed to a niche subcommunity of a small community.
Hmm I get your point, but on the other hand, I suppose nowadays many people are just used to look for a niche community … and finding it. So it’s not a huge surprise if the first reaction is disappointment when you don’t find anything like it or just an empty community.
But you’re seeing the effect of having multiple niche communities right now: they are mostly dead. Quite simply, there is not a sufficient user base to keep niche communities active. Along with lemmy search being as bad as (maybe worse than) Reddit search and the issue of having niche communities dispersed and duplicated through multiple instances.
It looks to me like the numerous, inactive niche communities we have now largely sprung up during the Reddit protest. People came over her for a few days, created a whole bunch of niche communities, but then those communities never got traction. It seems most users quickly went back to Reddit, and now we have all these little ghost towns.
“Solutions”:
I see a few fixes that may help this issue, but I think the largest barrier is the size of the user base. There probably are not enough users on lemmy right now to have a bunch of active niche communities (edit: even if other issues with connection users were fixed). From that perspective, as others her are saying, the practical solution seems to be to keep your activity to broader communities that cover the niche topic, and use those communities until there seems to be enough discussion on a niche topic to warrant a niche community.
Other fixes:
Aggregate communities: this is something that has been discussed on lemmy, but I haven’t followed in depth. But essentially, being able to have a “multilemmy”, which aggregates communities across instances. Eg, there may be 10 different “model_trains” communities spread across 10 instances. This means that there could be enough discussion across those 10 communities to have one active niche community. But there isn’t an easy way to get users to participate in one particular community/instance combo. Some way to aggregate those communities could really help connect users and content. I get the impression that we are unlikely to see this kind of feature any time soon (but like I said, I haven’t been following this issue).
The other solution is finding a way to hide/remove/mark inactive communities. There are lots of niche communities with zero or one post from months ago with no active owner or moderator. It is up to the instance owner to decide how to deal with those communities on their instance, which means there is not going to be consistent handling of these communities.
There is already a word for “reverse degrowth.” That word is “growth.” (Or “grow,” possibly “regrow” in your context.)
I have not much else to add other than I am continuing to post on Lemmy regardless of whether or not it becomes popular. I’m pretty much the only voice in the two communities I’m most active in, and if that winds up with me just shouting into the void about topics I like, well… I’ll still do it, because t that’s what I enjoy doing. Maybe some day, maybe not. Fuck it.
There is already a word for “reverse degrowth.” That word is “growth.”
😆 Love it, ya made me audibly laugh, because you are correct, and OP was so stuck in his head frustrated about this that he was thinking in double negatives 😆
The context I was trying to show that growing a community with continuous progress is different than taking a community that is shrinking, stopping the shrinking, and then causing positive growth.
Reddit will continue to fuck up and people will continue to come here. Give it time. Eventually, Reddit will fall apart.
I would suggest we add community nesting. It would allow people to easier find new communities and post in small communities without risking that no-one sees it
I think it’s the same as any other platform. Right now the content in small communities is limited, but over time once there is a sizable amount of content that newcomers can get referred from or go through, Lemmy as a whole will get more traction. Since the Reddit exodus happened I definitely feel like Lemmy has grown a lot and I’m here for the long run.
Time. This has happened a million times. The regular pattern is an explosion, a correction, then slow growth either until that platform becomes the new bad guy or gets destroyed by the government.
I’m sole mod (not the original creator, but took over when they went awol) for the knitting community at [email protected], and I do my best to contribute a lot to the cross stitch & embroidery one at [email protected] too. This is coming from a history of running various niche online groups. So a few things I would advise:
- First, just accept that some topics are too niche. They were too niche for Reddit as well, at one point. People got overexcited and wanted to mark their territory by setting up a ton of communities when they were new to Lemmy, but reality doesn’t work that way and a lot of those spaces just aren’t needed. We’d be better served combining posts from these into slightly more general combined communities, and perhaps leaving a sticky post in the tiny niche ones letting everyone know where to head to for that topic.
But if your topic is big enough to in theory get decent traction:
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Be grateful for what users you do have. You said you sometimes get “few” replies, so make sure you’re getting to know those people and replying to them and continuing the conversation where appropriate. You don’t need a lot of users, you just need a few engaged ones to make for a nice community.
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Recruit your friends. You’re a Chiefs fan, you probably know other Chiefs fans. Get them interested.
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Drop your community link wherever its relevant. People don’t like having to put effort into finding new communities but if they just happen to come across mention of it, they’ll click. Obviously I’m not saying spam, but there are plenty of sports fans here and it’s bound to come up in conversation.
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Crosspost. Any posts you make to a Chiefs community are probably also relevant to the wider NFL communities or maybe fantasy football players. And again this just gives more people the chance to stumble across the fact that you exist.
Ok these next couple are more involved, but they do work well!
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Consider Mastodon. I have a craft-focused account there too, and if I have a question about knitting or cross stitch or whatever then the more answers I can get the better, right? So I use the fact that we can post from Mastodon, to a Lemmy community, combining the replies from both audiences in one thread. Example of what I mean here.
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Create value. Could be by posting pillar content that’s actually useful (in your case could be some kind of statistical analysis, we all know the football nerds love it, but whatever will be long-term useful / interesting to your audience). Or it could be a regular community event or something ("predict the Chiefs wins/losses for the upcoming season and win something, etc etc).
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Ask your existing users what they’d like to see from the community. Some things you try will hit and some will miss, but getting feedback is going to up your chances!
That’s everything off the top of my head and it’s already a wall of text so I’ll stop there. It is absolutely difficult to be a mod, it can be a lot of work to get to the point of just having an active community that doesn’t need your input to keep rolling. But if your community see you trying, I think that goes a long way. Hope some of this was helpful!
I really like the mastodon suggestion, thank you!
Happy to help! I know it sounds kind of weird, posting from another platform. But if you look at it less as “how can I make MY community with MY name on it the BEST so everyone will worship ME” and more “how can I actually bring people together over a shared topic” it makes a lot of sense :)
I do wish the integration was a bit better though. It’s got its quirks, to put it mildly!
Once scaled sort arrives on Lemmy, smaller communities will be ranked higher and not knocked out by the meme communities and stuff like that.
Counting down the days!
Is there an ETA for that feature?
Once v0.19.0 releases (soon)
It seems this will only be useful for people who have subscribed to smaller communities - it’d just fuck up the default view if implemented there.
Probably an unpopular viewpoint, but Lemmy and Mastodon proponents need to suck it up and go be on Reddit and Twitter now and then just to advertise lemmy and mastodon. If no one is talking about these platforms there, no one will be thinking about migrating here. I went to Reddit for some specific emulation communities a day or so ago, and people there are asking where they can find piracy communities that don’t get banned, and it was appreciated when I mentioned you can find them here. Lemmy just isn’t talked about and given exposure unless someone already on lemmy makes the effort, and talking about it here constantly doesn’t make any difference.
Been wondering about that.
A few years ago I took on the practice of (as a writer) posting on FFN only to announce that my stories are on AO3. Try and drive the reader engagement from the bad site to the cool site and all that. Presumably what is intended here is that eg.: if I find a post / subject of discussion that I want to comment on on Reddit, what I do is post in an equivalent Lemmy community (or Kbin magazine, for that matter) and point to it in a Reddit post? Kinda like “read my comments on this subject here [link]”?
Interestingly, that’d be not too different from how one does with a blog, yes?
I like the model in that it’s kinda instant awareness - there’s almost no way to miss that the link goes to a different domain, among other things. What I wonder however is how much effective would it be at drawing in people vs being disregarded as (and even being modop’d away as) an ad.
Well, probably the best way is to just post a piece of actual content, original or stolen (edit: I mean like a meme, anything that’s recycled constantly), retweeted or whatever, with a reply of your own or a separate post that says something like “follow me on all my channels at” and list them. The common thread between these two services is that they are the main decentralized ones (but all other decentralized ones, like Pixelfed, the Instagram fediverse, suffer from the same problem), and it’s that structure that throws off a lot of people. It took me a while, too, just because I had to research wtf was going on and figure out where to get started. There’s one person on Twitter who sends out a daily reminder that they can be also found on bluesky, threads, post, spoutible, and their own website. Bluesky is the oddball as technically it’s part of the decentralized landscape, except there’s no decision making process at the beginning to choose what server to start on, everyone is onboarded at the same place. Regardless, that person would probably also add Mastodon to the list, if they weren’t confused by the lack of a single choice.
But then people stopped talking about Mastodon on Twitter, other than maybe to just have their Mastodon address in their Twitter bio if anyone happened to look, and the Reddit exodus slowed down as all the motivated people were already on Lemmy and not talking about it as an alternative on Reddit.
And it is effective, which is why Elon has at various time blocked links to Mastodon, Bluesky, Post, etc, and then unblocked later due to backlash over the obvious double standard when he’s complaining about freedom of speech so much. (Including Substack, which is where that Twitter Files guy Matt Taibbi tried to move his posts after his views tanked once Blue subscriptions and views got prioritized. I’m not a follower, just an observer on that one.) He’s afraid of the competition, and people finding out where else to be. And right now is a perfect time to be doing this, because people on Twitter want to get away from the antisemitic twat running the place where nothing is censored or banned, and certain Reddit communities are still annoyed by bans, or having content posts deleted by high-up admins due to takedown requests from Nintendo, etc. Or discord servers getting banned for similar reasons.
It’s just an issue of no ongoing exposure, and structural confusion from those used to a single place where everything happens for a platfrom.
Anyone that was around while Reddit was growing will remember that there were few subreddits to begin with. I think fediverse needs that to happen before expanding.
I don’t know how to fix it. Maybe sub-feddits need to be pruned if they aren’t thriving. Maybe tags in titles would be more helpful until they have enough content to warrant their on category.
There are a few niche communities that are doing well here. The Trekkies that meme over at risa, the NCD crowd and their Military-Industrial Complex fetish, and the meme community in general is fairly healthy and active.
But I agree with you that there isn’t that critical mass that Reddit has that allows organic niche growth to occur. We’re simply too small. Even small Reddit communities like /r/Kenshi (131k) or /r/Factorio (347k) have more subscribers than the entirety of all Lemmy instances (60k). It’s impossible to compete when there is such a mismatch of scale, especially against behemoths like /r/funny with subscriber bases in the millions.
What can we do? Just keep making this place our home. Post interesting things you find on the Internet, copypasta memes, that sort of stuff. I don’t know if it’ll grow it but if enough of us do this it won’t stagnate.
Risa is something else at the moment lol… gee wilikers
Go them!
part of the reason why some communities stick and some dont is because the type of people who were willing to jump to lemmy. Users who jumped to lemmy generally were more tech forward, privacy forward, or was part of some ostracized community not very welcome on reddit, as the typical casual user does not care for site politics.
its really hard to start a small community with one main poster, and requires a few to get the ball rolling. its a game of converting those in the niche communities to make the jump
I personally made the jump, caz I’m trying to be more conscious about my digital life. When I hopped on here, asked this and that, read/wrote comments, the community was just so much better (still is). This wholesome, selfless, helpful bunch in one place. I really can’t care about not being a terraria fandom alive here (one of my most active subs for a while). I stay for the people.
also lemmy memes suck, wtf guys, post funny things pls
I feel you.
I really just think the reddit/lemmy structure isn’t very suited to small communities.
For small communities we should have a platform structured like a traditional web forum with flat threads and thread bumping. This causes people to get endless streams of discussion even with relatively few users.
Thread bumping would help a lot actually!
Yes. In my teenage years, these kinds of web forums were the norm, now they are almost as outdated as Usenet or mailing lists. I think that is a shame because I found web forums utterly addictive while on reddit and lemmy I tend to quickly run out of things to read.
“new comments” sort is basically that.
I saw a bunch of posts from @[email protected] promoting a project called fediverser which at first i thought was just like lemmit didn’t see the need for it. The main difference is that not just posts are imported into Lemmy, but also the comments. The idea is that for each reddit user who comments, that comment is added to a shadow profile in Lemmy and commented on the post. The idea being over time, the reddit users will have profiles in Lemmy already populated, that they can take ownership of, and don’t have to start from scratch finding an instance or creating an account.
Obviously everyone has their opinions of it, but maybe it’d work out for the Kerbal Space Program community, since Lemmy is more technically focused. This might remove a barrier of entry for new users joining your communities.
This guy…
That sounds like it has some privacy implications that don’t sound too agreeable. Posts you make on one site being duplicated on another site without your knowledge or consent is an ethical breach of trust.
What about “privacy” is being violated when every post and submission is public and indexable by any search engine?
If you join service Y and make posts with your username under Y, you don’t automatically consent to having those posts reposted on service Z under your username.
