Is there any way to reverse degrowth of the niche communities on Lemmy?

Hjalamanger, 7 months ago

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

Raiderkev, 7 months ago

First and foremost, let’s get this out of the way…

Fuck the Chiefs.

Now that we’ve cleared up that order of business, yes, it is disappointing that there aren’t many niche communities. I still have to go to /r/raiders because there is little to no activity on the Raiders instances I found. Granted, I’ll admit, I’m kinda part of the problem bc when I looked them up, I just saw the posts were outdated and old, and never bothered engaging, or trying to make those communities happen. I remember they blacked out our sub for a day or week or whatever, and nothing really came of it. Engagement seems the same. I’m guessing sports communities as a whole don’t really care about the bs reddit pulled w 3rd party apps, and probably were less likely to have been using a 3rd party app or cared. I remember seeing comments along the lines of “good, glad the sub’s back. What were y’all even trying to accomplish with your little protest anyways?” I wish people did care because I have to use the shitty mobile site for reddit bc I’m for sure not installing their dumpster fire app.

poopsmith, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Here’s some things Lemmy could potentially implement:

• a default sort that favors smaller communities
• better onboarding for new users that guides them into discovering new communities
• giving recommendations to other similar communities

Omgpwnies, 7 months ago

I would also like a sort that favours posts on subbed communities, while still browsing ‘everything’

CoderKat, 7 months ago

The sorting algorithm changes are what I’ve been waiting for forever. A bit disappointed it’s taking so long. I basically never see many communities I’m subbed to. I miss having a local city community. It has me constantly thinking of just dealing with Reddit’s bullshit, cause if it’s not big news or memes, Lemmy ain’t cutting it.

DJSpunTheDisc, 7 months ago

a default sort that favors smaller communities

Someone should make an issue on that in the github!

Xylight, 7 months ago

Once scaled sort arrives on Lemmy, smaller communities will be ranked higher and not knocked out by the meme communities and stuff like that.

thegiddystitcher, 7 months ago

Counting down the days!

Mkengine, 7 months ago

Is there an ETA for that feature?

emptiestplace, 7 months ago

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.

corsicanguppy, 7 months ago

degrowth

I know one way.

Agent641, 7 months ago

Un-degrowth?

Tier1BuildABear, 7 months ago

Undegrowth, what happens when I see my wife naked for the millionth time

Evotech, 7 months ago

Regressive Reverse negative down-growth?

thegiddystitcher, 7 months ago

I’m sole mod (not the original creator, but took over when they went awol) for the knitting community at !knitting, and I do my best to contribute a lot to the cross stitch & embroidery one at !lemmy_stitch 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:

• 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.
• Recruit your friends. You’re a Chiefs fan, you probably know other Chiefs fans. Get them interested.
• 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.
• 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!

• 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.
• 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).
• 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!

governorkeagan, 7 months ago

I really like the mastodon suggestion, thank you!

thegiddystitcher, 7 months ago

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!

rufus, 7 months ago

I feel you.

schnurrito, 7 months ago

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.

MelonYellow, 7 months ago

Thread bumping would help a lot actually!

schnurrito, 7 months ago

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.

Agent641, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

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.

governorkeagan, 7 months ago

I really like that idea!

Xylight, 7 months ago

“new comments” sort is basically that.

amio, 7 months ago

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.

Kedly, 7 months ago

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”

amio, 7 months ago

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.

Kedly, 7 months ago

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

Brkdncr, 7 months ago

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.

Gork, 7 months ago

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.

Ringmasterincestuous, 7 months ago

Risa is something else at the moment lol… gee wilikers

Go them!

derf82, 7 months ago

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.

Ziggurat, 7 months ago

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

spiderman, 7 months ago

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.

megrania, 7 months ago

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.

Spiracle, 7 months ago

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.

megrania, 7 months ago

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.

MrZee, 7 months ago

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.

BURN, 7 months ago

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.

RightHandOfIkaros, 7 months ago

Oshi no Ko is not niche lol

Jordan117, 7 months ago

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.

moeggz, 7 months ago

I agree with this, but I think many subscribers are from accounts that are no longer active.

bamboo, 7 months ago

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.

FartsWithAnAccent, 7 months ago

Contribute to them and invite people.

bamboo, 7 months ago

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.

rglullis, 7 months ago

This guy…

He gets me

Gork, 7 months ago

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.

rglullis, 7 months ago

What about “privacy” is being violated when every post and submission is public and indexable by any search engine?

Gork, 7 months ago

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.

rglullis, 7 months ago

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.

bamboo, 7 months ago

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.