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™””“”

  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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    54 minutes ago

    Except this link doesn’t work properly /c/books , until it does lemmy is broken, the fediverse is broken, lemmy is not really federated.

    • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 hours ago

      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.

  • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    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.

    • Sc00ter@lemm.ee
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      33 minutes ago

      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

    • Jesus_666@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      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.

  • Hikermick@lemmy.world
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    46 minutes ago

    During the initial mass migration from Reddit I got the impression a lot of people were starting communities on Lemmy that had been successful on Reddit but put no effort into them. I’ll bet there is a statistic yet to be figured out that says you need a million platform members before you can have enough members to sustain a niche community like c/gothcountry.

    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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      50 minutes ago

      Even those that did, remain invisible. This link doesn’t work /c/books

      Until the link /c/books shows any user, with only one click, the aggregate of all “books” communities in a single place, without subscribing or even logging in. Then lemmy will stagnate because it is failing to live up to its promise of federated decentralization

  • SnokenKeekaGuard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 hours ago

    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.

    • jawa21@lemmy.sdf.org
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      2 minutes ago

      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.

    • SnokenKeekaGuard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 hours ago

      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.

      • Rolando@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        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.

      • UltraHamster64@lemmy.worldOP
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        4 hours ago

        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

        • SnokenKeekaGuard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 hours ago

          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.

      • SnokenKeekaGuard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 hours ago

        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!

  • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    The problem isn’t that they won’t create them, there’s insufficient biomass to populate them.

    If I want to talk about a 5-year-old video game with myself, I’ll just open Notepad.

    • UltraHamster64@lemmy.worldOP
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      4 hours ago

      As @Zombiepirate@lemmy.world said in a comment here, we can use general communities to find “biomass needed” to populate small communities

      Although I can see the point you are making, and I agree to some extent. I still think it is better to try

      • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        I totally agree, and I did try. It was just some kind of soul reposting things from Reddit and me.

      • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        Well, the sub in question had one person copying the articles from Reddit and me commenting on them. That was decidedly too few :)

        Philosophically, I think you need enough engagement that there’s chat at least a few times a week in the group. Anything less than that and it’s closer to a search engine result than a community.

  • Zombiepirate@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    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.

    • wjrii@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      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.

    • Voltage@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 hours ago

      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.

    • atro_city@fedia.io
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      49 minutes ago

      Fuck outta here with USAmerican politics. That shit is hella mid. Now, American politics though… what Maduro up to nowadays?

  • ddplf@szmer.info
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    5 hours ago

    Sure man, lemme just real quick create a whole ass community, spend countless hours striving to attract people and moderate it when these guys try to post some horrifying shit… all that to find the location of the one missing collectible from the game that I’m currently trying to complete.

    • Maalus@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      And then do that for 15 other things you are into but don’t have their own community. So you can go take a dump and scroll through dump-time after which you go back to work. Or alternatively, to managing the 15 communities you now are responsible for.