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.
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 In my teenage years, these kinds of web forums were the norm, now they are almost as outdated as Usenet or mailing lists.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.
Tags would be good. Rather than crossposting, tag your post in up to 5 communities. A photo of a bird might be tagged in Nature Photography, Birds, Animals, and horses.
If a the moderator of c/horses decides the submission is not apropriate, they can un-tag themselves. If all communities un-tag themselves, the submission is ‘orphaned’ its no longer visible in any C, but still exists in the OPs profile.
The user cannot re-tag c/horses, but can add a new tag if they want. If our man keeps tagging birds as horses, then they might be banned from submitting to the horse tag for a period.
This allows one post to be visible over many communities without crossposting, reposting, or having related overheads of duplication.
If the user does not want to be harrased by ornithologists arguing over whether they think its a western red breasted great titwarbler or a northern red breasted lesser titwarbler, they may also untag their submission from c/birds
Tags on a submission would be visible to users, so if I find this cool titwarbler photo through the nature photography C, but I want to see more titwarblers, I might check out c/birds, or c/horses.
Some of the larger Cs might opt-out of the multiple tag system, allowing submissions only if theirs is the only C tagged.
But pre-agriculture civilisations heavily relied on fish and were almost exclusivily found near coasts and rivers. So it’s been a very important food source for humans since pre-history.
Niche communities either need to cohere on their own, or live on a site that's large enough to sustain them. Spreading activity over too many communities/mags/subs/channels/whatever will make things seem even less active, and will make participation less appealing. People will always drop out, and if people don't "drop in" through search or discovery, activity obviously can only go down.
Meanwhile the fediverse has other issues - it is inherently "techy" and most major selling points are things "casuals" just don't give a shit about. Also, some of them just aren't true - it really sucks if you traipse up here with the expectation of less "site politics" and admin fuckery, and then run into you-know-which instances, instances being run maliciously, weird federation/defederation antics etc.
The fediverse as a concept and the lemmy.world-aligned part of it both have serious issues that could make activity hard to increase by putting off both existing and prospective users.
Yeah, the amount of Tankies here is JARRING. Up until this point I had been someone who fell in the “Communism is a nice ideal, but in the real world its never panned out and may be likely to always pan out the way it has done so so far when tried”, and it took like a WEEK on Lemmy to go from that to “No fucking WONDER communism has always ended up the way it has”
It absolutely is, although I'm not even talking about communism specifically. I'm basically a socdem and a leftist (as far as actual, normal society goes - less so for Lemmy, obviously), though that's completely irrelevant. It's all about... just shitty behavior, false flagging, wannabe-authoritarian, bad-faith, trolling, dishonest bullshit. Question communities like this and asklemmy are chock-full of thinly veiled soapboxing and questions loaded more heavily than a thousand cargo ships. Even if you agree with the basic points, it's fucking obnoxious. Not only that, it's bloody stupid and a prime example of shooting oneself in the foot, at least if the idea was ever that more than about forty people would use this thing.
Reddit was full of subs where the (often right-wing or particularly right-wing tolerant but not exclusively) twats-in-charge banned you from subs or the site at the drop of a hat. This was a major selling point for the fediverse - why if that happens on the fediverse, it's Decentralized so you'd just blahdiblahdiblah. In reality, though, several communities - the only active ones in many cases - are apparently sticking around on instances where the only difference from r/conservative or whatever is the paintjob on aforementioned twat-in-charge and their views. If they're not condoning "power" abuse, trolling and spam from even more blatantly bad-faith instances, they certainly aren't doing anything to mitigate it. That doesn't really look dramatically better as far as fairness and tolerance go.
I was wanting to respond to this, but tbh, you said everything pretty well yourself and I dont really have anything further to contribute other than I agree with a lot of your points here
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 and other meme subs are perhaps a bit too successful. I already unsubscribed from one men’s sub and am thinking about risa because they just dominate my feed too much.
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
Content is what drags users, not yet another niche community.
Absolutely not, I had to make a post last week to find something that’s niche in reddit and not on lemmy because it had a sub and lemmy didn’t have a community on it. I always make posts on any niche community if I have to. I don’t mind whether it’s dead or not. I am sure many people feel that way too.
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.
Unfortunately some niches don’t fit with other, larger communities. Simracing, for example, makes no sense in gaming communities, but also makes no sense in car communities.
I’m spending more and more time back on Reddit because that’s where the community is. Otherwise it’s just empty with the occasional post here.
There’s always going to be an activity difference given the userbase gap, but it’s a mistake imho to see a slow-paced community as “dead”. As long as it has active subscribers, any post will get votes and comments from people who see it, even if it’s been weeks or months since the last post in that community. Slower-paced, but still there for whatever content gets posted.
I’m not sure if the mod tools make this easier, but you could measure a community’s engagement by taking the total number of upvotes/downvotes comments for all posts, and dividing by the number of subscribers in the community. This would at least be a measurement to quantify a decline or steady state over time. Obviously perception matters, if people feel like a community is dead, they’ll leave, and it’ll be a self fulfilling prophecy.
I saw a bunch of posts from @rglullis 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.
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.
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.
This is not about privacy, it’s about copyright. And pretty much like archive.org, having a site mirroring public content can be argued to be fair use.
Reddit states in the privacy policy that they are already sharing this information already:
How We Share Information
Much of the information on the Services is public and accessible to everyone, even without an account. By using the Services, you are directing us to share this information publicly and freely.
When you submit content (including a post, comment, or chat message) to a public part of the Services, any visitors to and users of our Services will be able to see that content, the username associated with the content, and the date and time you originally submitted the content. Reddit allows other sites to embed public Reddit content via our embed tools. Reddit also allows third parties to access public Reddit content via the Reddit API and other similar technologies.
Go chiefs! I’m from KC so it’s cool to see a community on lemmy—and I had no idea it existed until right now.
I feel the exact same way my friend. Even when lemmy was on the rise (when I joined), I knew that it wasn’t going to receive wide adoption. And unfortunately wide adoption is exactly what is needed to solve the problems you have mentioned.
As much as I love the idea of lemmy, I like the idea of community and connection more. I say go to the places where you find those things because that will be the most meaningful to you. You may find that for a more privacy and free thinking community on lemmy, but for other topics you probably have to go elsewhere. For now.
So go and connect with people over things that you love!
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
Yeah I figured go/baduk would be a hard community to start, which is one of the reasons I chose the Chiefs.
But this isn’t just the difficulty of growing a community from a small start, this is seeing a community grow then shrink. Going through many niche communities the post rate and comment rate seems down across the board, outside of the biggest communities on the site. Combatting a shrinking community seems even more difficult than growing from a small start.
still part of the network effect – some users were willing to give up Reddit and start a new community on Lemmy but the rest of the community stayed behind – the ones heading back to Reddit are more about the community than about where it’s located
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 think lemmy isnt a bastion of hope for media its just another thing to doom scroll on. people think theyre fighting the good fight because theyre doom scrolling another app. stop thinking about the company exploiting you. youre literally exploiting yourself by wasting so much time scrolling.
this app will likely never grow because theres no necessity this fills except for niche linux bros. at least theres a place for those weirdos to congregate now.
I appreciate all you admins here, I really do. Far more transparent than from Reddit and you do it all without making profit.
The pinned post to Lemmy World sounded like (to me) that you recognize a lot of people signed up, made communities, and then have abandoned Lemmy leaving a lot of ghost communities that you all want to clean up. Totally understandable, especially with all the legal considerations about leaving online spaces unmoderated.
It just got me thinking about how Lemmy has changed, and how I really want it to succeed. I can try and follow this suggestion, but I almost feel like for a lot of the more niche interests, Lemmy will sort of just be in a holding mode until Reddit inevitably fumbles the ball again leading to a new migration, this time with a more clear destination.
Hey! I appreciate your input and totally agree🙂it’s not an easy process and we don’t expect it to happen too quickly, but we do believe that this platform will make it. And we’re trying to build a culture of transparency, kindness and support, which is made very achievable by amazing people like you!
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