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™””“”
And then post it in New Communities and other boards like it to advertise it!
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.
This probably has a much higher accuracy rate.
!casualconversation@lemm.ee can help too
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.
And still, the community I started ( !dontdeadopeninside@lemmy.ohaa.xyz ) somewhat exists alongside it. Although Im afraid you’ve won.
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!
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.
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.
Yeah that is very fair. However, you can say “I’m sitting in my own corner, with blackjack and hookers”
Y=x^2 lmao
The comments on that post genuinely made my day.
Ps. Not to complain but -x²
Damnit
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.
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
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.
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.
Oh yeah I gotta go do that sometime
Hi my name is variants and I’m a niche community mod
starts sobbing
Can recommend. Sometimes it does really well, sometimes it doesn’t. Its worth a try anytime anyways
Yes! It is worth a try!
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.
Feel free to drop a post on !oldgamers@lemmy.world if you want to talk old games.
!patientgamers@sh.itjust.works has a larger population
Just how much biomass does a subthread really need?
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.
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
I totally agree, and I did try. It was just some kind of soul reposting things from Reddit and me.
“Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder, but don’t nobody wanna lift no heavy-ass weights.”
Ronnie Coleman
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.
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.
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.
!casualconversation@lemmy.world 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.
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.
Still good numbers for how big Lemmy is
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.
Pretty much what I’m doing at !amiga@sopuli.xyz
How about no, that sounds super depressing
Why would I do that? That doesn’t get anyone what they want
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.
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
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
!stardewvalley@lemm.ee 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.
Not for free.
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.
For curiosity, where did you advertise the community? In the “new communities”/“find a community” communities? In music-related communities? Or both?
Hmm. I made no effort to advertise at all. I came during the Rexodus last year after the API kerfuffle. Initially, it seemed promising, and I didn’t think I’d need to, but activity died down quite quickly. I’ve never moderated a community before or anything like that. I certainly don’t want to it to become a full time job. I have enough of those.
I’d never seen this community before. Subscribed!
I’m terrible at keyboards, but I do like to play with 'em.
Welcome to the club!
Same! On all those things
We need better discoverable tools. I subscribed to the community
Welcome!
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!
For real, there are people who will volunteer to do that, to help a community get off the ground. See !fedigrow@lemm.ee.
Create a Community. If I do that who will hold my dick when I wanna take a piss.
whining about whining. classic!
That one comment on the asklemmy post radicalised my man.
Yeah im furiuos!!!
i think we’ll be feeling the ramifications of that one post for quite a while…
Which one?