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™””“”

  • @ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world
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    239 months ago

    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 !general@lemmy.world. 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 !justpost@lemmy.world. Similar vibes.

  • 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.

      • 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!

    • jawa21
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      119 months 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.

      • balderdash
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        28 months ago

        The funny thing is, if you don’t fit into the culture (or even just disagree with moderation) people tell you to go start your own. Which is like telling you to go sit in a corner by yourself.

        • jawa21
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          18 months ago

          Yeah that is very fair. However, you can say “I’m sitting in my own corner, with blackjack and hookers”

    • 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.

      • UltraHamster64OP
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        119 months 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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          9 months 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.

      • @Rolando@lemmy.world
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        329 months 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.

  • FQQD
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    99 months ago

    Can recommend. Sometimes it does really well, sometimes it doesn’t. Its worth a try anytime anyways

  • @linearchaos@lemmy.world
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    829 months 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.

  • Dr. Wesker
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    9 months ago

    “Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder, but don’t nobody wanna lift no heavy-ass weights.”

    Ronnie Coleman

  • @Zombiepirate@lemmy.world
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    379 months 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.

    • @Voltage@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      39 months 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.

    • @ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world
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      29 months ago

      Hey speaking of, while !games@lemmy.world is a great example, if you’re not finding similar communities for your interest, feel free to post over in !general@lemmy.world 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.

    • @wjrii@lemmy.world
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      199 months 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.

  • @CAVOK@lemmy.world
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    09 months ago

    Been posting to “Europe” since forever. Still only a fraction of users compared to that other site. About 3000 monthly I believe. Driving engagement is harder than it seems.

    • sag
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      99 months ago

      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.

      • @oo1@lemmings.world
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        99 months ago

        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.

        • sag
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          39 months ago

          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.

          • @PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
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            29 months ago

            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

              • @PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
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                18 months ago

                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.

  • @Underwaterbob@lemm.ee
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    689 months ago

    I did. There’s almost zero engagement. My most popular thread is a meta narrative about me being in there talking to myself. There were at least two other attempts that are even more inactive. Not enough of y’all are into synthesizers.

    https://lemm.ee/c/synthesizers

  • @ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    19 months ago

    I mean, really, I just want other people to be moderating it even if I’m the only one posting stuff. Ain’t nobody got time for dat!