Well, I don’t know if “niche” is the best term, but I’m still pretty alone posting on
I also started two others recently
Part of the problem is the smaller instances don’t even see those communities when you post, I was unaware of 75% of the communities you just listed. I have a micro instance, and if I don’t subscribe I don’t see it.
It’s probably not much of an issue, given that most people are on a couple mega instances…
Hey, nice to see you here!
I know community discoverability can be an issue. When I launched [email protected] and [email protected], I used my alts on the top 10 instances to subscribe to them so that they would show in the All feed of those instances.
For small instances, I tried to post too to [email protected] and [email protected], but beyond that there isn’t really much I can do.
There was a tool that could help address that (I don’t have the name right now), but last time I tried it, it wasn’t working, so I’m not sure it’s that useful.
Good to be seen! Smart of you to preseed The larger instances good strategy
I think the clients are going to have to solve this, maybe look at the all feed on multiple servers, and then only show you what’s different compared to your own server.
Discoverability is the key weakness of Lemmy, just like mastodon
Not sure clients might be the solution here, I think at the end people will have to choose
- go to a large instance and rely on other people to populate the All feed for you
- go to a small instance but know that you’ll have to subscribe to most of the communities yourself
Are you familiar with Lemmy Federate? Participating instances get a bot that follows submitted communities to get them in feeds and then unsubscribes once a real user from the instance subs.
Ah, that’s the cool I was looking for! Are we sure this tool is completely functional? The large number of “in progress” instances always gives me doubt
It used to be Lemmy Community Boost and I think it still works despite the status. I do keep meaning to track the developer down and give them a nudge.
I’m not sure tbh. Pretty sure it’s run by the lemy.lol admin?
deleted by creator
The second scenario is viable, if Lemmy was a lot more vibrant, and had enough population that the niche communities could keep you busy. Right now I wake up and check Lemmy and I’ve gotten through all the new posts in 20 minutes. So it’s getting kind of quiet
It is indeed quiet.
I wanted to try something and blocked all news/memes/tech/politics communities last week, my All feed is definitely much more quieter.
Which I don’t mind, but there is definitely stuff to do to get it the communities “beyond memes-tech-news” active
Checking [email protected] can be useful sometimes
Yeah you pretty much have to use https://lemmyverse.net/communities
There’s a feature request here that would help https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2951
There’s a feature request here that would help https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2951
I remember this one, doesn’t seem to get much traction unfortunately 😔
That’s a really good feature! I hope it gets implemented
For Voyager, I already suggested that they highlight communities for subscribe to when they are displayed, and that would make it easier to subscribe to new communities, so you don’t have to check to see if you’ve already subscribed
Consider participating in lemmy-federate.com/ ? That should help.
Dragged Dragonball over to my instance.
Thanks!
@[email protected] can you create [email protected] so we can try and transition that community over to there blaze is doing amazing work in terms of making it feel active, but I’m all about decentralization. I also think @[email protected] and @[email protected] would both be great as part of the moderation team.
I do own lemmy.futbol if someone would want to co create an instance, but frankly I do not have a lot of free time so I could only help out in a supporting capacity
To be honest as mentioned elsewhere I’m not the most convinced about having all of the theme instances managed by rglullis.
Raphael, don’t get me wrong, you are doing a very good job, and I really hope you’ll succeed with your new NLNet grant, but having all of those instances depending on you, even if you seem to have a backup person, seems risky.
@[email protected], also the Euro 2024 is starting later this week, I think it’s just too late to migrate now if we want a decent level of activity during the event. We can always revisit later, but I wouldn’t move now.
You’re not wrong in the slightest.
Glad to see we agree!
It feels a bit of a Catch-22, doesn’t it?
The first topic-based I started was selfhosted. Not by choice, but because the mods of /r/selfhosted refused to run their own instance and instead went to LW. The others have similar stories. There are also instances that I went as far as setting up the domain name and creating the first communities (roll20), but shutting them down after I noticed that there was already some other instance (ttrpg) filling a similar need.
I’ll gladly get the instances out of my back, if they grow to the point that enough people are using it and willing to moderate it. But they are never going to grow if key members in the network keep rejecting it on the grounds of “I don’t trust it”, will it?
Aside from the differences that Communick is a commercial venture while the “larger” instances are “begware”, I honestly don’t know what is that I am asking that makes people reject it so vehemently.
I agree with most of what you are saying.
I guess in this case programming.dev is a solid choice enough for a !linux community, in the same vein as ttrpg.network was for DnD and RPG.
@[email protected] what do you think?
I’ll gladly get the instances out of my back, if they grow to the point that enough people are using it and willing to moderate it. But they are never going to grow if key members in the network keep rejecting it on the grounds of “I don’t trust it”, will it?
On a completely different level, I would gladly give a few communities back to other people. I guess there are only so many people having time and energy to keep the whole thing alive, and we are all stretched a bit too thin.
Instance management is a much more important commitment than moderation, though.
Instance management is a much more important commitment than moderation, though.
It’s important but it isn’t a huge amount of work, especially if you have a good team to spread the load.
It also helps that I am running a managed instance hosting business, and I should be more comfortable doing this than the average hobbyist?
Yes, I’d imagine there are efficiencies to doing that - we inherited a thriving medium-sized instance so, despite one of the team having spun up their own Lemmy instance, there was a lot of “learning on the job” required to get everything humming along nicely. I imagine that, with more experience it becomes easier.
On the other hand, having a lot of instances managed by you increase the impact in case something happens
Instance management is a much more important commitment than moderation, though.
Do you want any more commitment than a business running 10+ instances for almost a year now? Paying $1000+ per year on the domains alone?
Forgive my bluntness, but it seems that the fact that Communick is (or tries to be) a for-profit venture bothers you?
Do you want any more commitment than a business running 10+ instances for almost a year now? Paying $1000+ per year on the domains alone?
That’s what I mean. You have higher costs as you manage 10+ instances. Could those costs lead you to stop the project at some point? I know you don’t like begware, but that’s another model that can also work (most of the instances have celebrated their first birthday recently)
Forgive my bluntness, but it seems that the fact that Communick is (or tries to be) a for-profit venture bothers you?
No worries. Actually it’s not really the business model that concerns me (I’m neutral), but the centralization of instances managed by one entity.
If anything happened to the most popular 10 instances, Lemmy would probably die overnight.
Having one instance down, even for weeks (LW last year) still allowed other instances to operate
I know you don’t like begware, but that’s another model that can also work (most of the instances have celebrated their first birthday recently)
“Begware” seems so negative - I like to recall the maxim: “If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product.” The rise the Big Tech social media firms was propelled by convenience and there being no obvious upfront costs. Enshittification has shown us what the actual costs are.
The Fediverse shows a better way to do it but, if you aren’t selling your users data, then someone has to pay. If one person is footing the bill, then that is a single point of failure. Luckily, costs are quite low, so it doesn’t need a lot of people to chip in to cover the costs - I will.admit to being concerned when we launched the feddit.uk fundraiser, as I wasn’t sure how much we’d raise but, within a couple of days we’d got almost enough to cover the year’s costs with a good steady stream of donations. It means the instance’s financial future is secure.
You have higher costs as you manage 10+ instances.
The costs of running the instances is sunk already, because I run them on the same infra that I use for my projects, and it’s not a couple of hundred dollars per month that is going to make or break things for me. The worst case scenario is “I go back to a full-time job and Communick becomes yet-again a side-project/hobby”. The case where any of these instances become big enough to the point that it demands more from me is better than any of the current situation.
(begware is) another model that can also work (most of the instances have celebrated their first birthday recently).
I honestly don’t see it this way. Activity through the network has been abysmal. Operating an instance at this level should be incredibly easy, but even then we have things like bigger instances having issues with lack of moderators, basic federation issues between the larger instances mostly because of network latency… all that show that we should be collectively putting a lot more resources into this if we truly want to have a credible alternative to Reddit and Facebook Groups.
If anything happened to the most popular 10 instances, Lemmy would probably die overnight.
I don’t want to sound too pessimistic, but Lemmy feels pretty much dead already. My feed is mostly content from the communities that I’ve been posting + the two of three stubborn users (like yo)u who have been trying as hard as possible to make something out of it.
The Linux thing is already done. I was just saying I would’ve preferred a less “Linux is only for programmers” style home. But for Dungeons and Dragons, Table Top Role Playing Game Network is the epitome of perfection in a home.
You really dislike “main”, huh?
There is also [email protected], if you prefer.
Hate it. It needs a football 😏
I was thinking of breaking main into !news, !highlights and !talk. Football@soccer seems a bit redundant (and schizophrenic in terminology)
Trust me, just create football. Remember, very few people on this planet call it soccer
I’ve been most invested into helping [email protected] get going. It seems like there are plenty of lurkers and a growing amount of engagement by comments, but people are still shy about posting links or discussions. News in the genre has been slow the past couple months, though.
I tried with [email protected]. As a general rule, I’ll prioritize posting content to smaller instances, and I picked out that community on my home instance to do so, but I think it’s just not happening. I’m moving over to [email protected].
I’m also glad [email protected] is doing well. Seems like they’ve got a good plan going on over there, with relevant stickies, a useful sidebar, and link exchange.
Houseplants community seems great!
I like the houseplants stuff. I will add something useful to the bicycletouring sidebar too.
I started to post recently to [email protected], good activity over there (after all, it’s Linux on Lemmy), other people have started posting there too
I’m really digging the Linux content on Lemmy, it’s already pretty lively
To be fair, that’s probably the one topic the vast majority of users care about ha ha
Good activity on [email protected], thanks to post from @[email protected] and
There is some progress on a potential bot, that would help for sure
Still a bit frustrating to see that the moderation team on [email protected] isn’t doing much with that place, but that’s life I guess
Good activity on [email protected], thanks to post from @[email protected] and @[email protected]
Happy to have somewhere to post film news - I get a tonne in my feed but there are so many film communities I hadn’t got round to figuring out which to commit to. You helped that choice along.
Still a bit frustrating to see that the moderation team on [email protected] isn’t doing much with that place, but that’s life I guess
In the end, you can only worry about your own communities.
Yeah, I have a habit of sharing news that only really interests me. That’s why I don’t share everything I come across. A friend and I used to run a website together, and I got quite used to posting the latest film trailers and interesting news that I came across. Although sometimes I found it really hard to post news about films I didn’t really care about. I had to write something to accompany the video.
Me too - the algorithm offers me a range of film news and I tend to only pass on stutt that interests me but I will try harder to share a wider range.
In the end, you can only worry about your own communities.
We still managed to got [email protected] locked down, so there is an extend of influence we can have even on other communities
Oh indeed - it’s always possible to reach out to an Admin to try and sort out any issues - they’re quite obvious though, as they have duplicate communities on the same instance.
What about [email protected]?
They permabanned me a while back for suggesting pinned posts in the community: https://lemm.ee/modlog/408863
I provided more explanations in this post: https://sh.itjust.works/post/13874713?scrollToComments=true
Other people have had the same kind of treatment. I even discussed with the lemm.ee admin about this, and he told me that even though he understood I got upset, he didn’t want to interfere with community moderation.
So we started [email protected]. Still feels a bit sour about this, I guess I was among the top contributors to [email protected]
Well that’s disconcerting.
It is. On the other side, [email protected] is now much more active than the other one, so at least there’s that: https://lemm.ee/communities
As Emperor said, the best communities will survive. I don’t think their type of moderation is the best.
Do you think at some point it would be worthwhile to start a television community on lemm.ee as well? I know right now [email protected] is for both but eventually I imagine it might be best to separate them.
Kinda happy how at the start of the season [email protected] got a bit of traffic. But i’m not all that hopeful really because the regular bicycling subs with way more subscribers have also very little traffic. I sometimes wonder if all that even makes sense here if it isn’t about computers, memes or politics.
The camping, ultralight, outdoor communities are pretty much just dead.
Kinda happy how at the start of the season [email protected] got a bit of traffic. But i’m not all that hopeful really because the regular bicycling subs with way more subscribers have also very little traffic.
Nice that you got a bit of traffic. Maybe it stays low because people interesting in bicycle touring aren’t that much on Reddit, without even mentioning Lemmy?
The camping, ultralight, outdoor communities are pretty much just dead.
Can you please provide links? Should they maybe try to consolidate at first, to get more activity in one place?
Yeah it is a niche activity, sure.
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]Camping i think theoretically has some actual users, the solarpunkers seem to mostly repost stuff, not do or plan to do something. I don’t think consolidation will do much.
Maybe try to redirect people from [email protected] to [email protected] ? Some subscribers might like to be told there is another active community
To be completely honest, i am a bit turned off how slrpnk’s take on niche communities appears to be. They seem to care not much about the topic, but how and where communities are hosted. They don’t link to the bicycle touring community because it’s on .world, not to camping because it’s on sh.itjust.works etc, as these instances (and many others) are “not part of the free world” and opressors. This is not how you grow the fediverse, i believe.
Oh, interesting, I didn’t know. Seems a bit detrimental indeed
It was this chat in the solarpunk travel community that made me go all homer simpson back into the hedge.
Interesting, thanks.
Also, happy Lemmyversary
I’ve been trying to get a bit of life into [email protected] and [email protected] - Rome wasn’t sacked in a day though and experience suggests bloody minded persistence is the key.
I also started [email protected] - still early days.
A couple weeks ago I started occasionally posting to [email protected] when the main daily poster said they were taking a week off. That worked out nicely. They were offline for a week again recently and I “filled in the gap” again with daily posting.
I was posting music links daily to [email protected] last August but ran through my main playlist by March. I’ve been trying to post at least once a week since then.
[email protected] only gets sporadic posting. I’m trying to post once a week.
On [email protected] the regular poster said they were out of content. A couple of us said we’d post, but personally I only have like 4-5 more posts worth of content.
Nice communities!
[email protected] is still doing ok, though not quite at its peak. I don’t think new subs are going up by much these days. I have seen comments by a few new names, which is very nice to see. Overall comment levels are about the same. Upvotes seem steady, but not as high as they were around the new year. I do think the year end festivities really boosted things though.
I’m happy to be ahead of [email protected] again though (no offense, I love opossums too, but I want to be #1 wild animal sub!) and I look to be top of the 2nd page of communities overall, so even though I’m not doing quite as well as I perhaps feel I should be doing, I feel I can’t complain too much.
I still get a few positive compliments each week and people are sharing their personal stories with owls, which is always nice to hear. As long as I know the content is making people happy, I feel it’s worth the work.
I’ve enjoyed having a few things to share with the [email protected] community. I’ve gotten some great recommended reading materials from that group in return. Maybe I’ll have to look into more collabs and get some cross promotion going.
Trying my best to keep casual HistoryLemmy alive. Sometimes I get contributors with great stuff in HistoryPorn, but I’m almost entirely alone in HistoryArtifacts, HistoryIllustrations, HistoryRuins, and HistoryMemes.
Hello,
Maybe Lemmy is too small to have such specific communities?
They’ve grown substantially since they were created. There’s interest in the subject, and interaction, just not a lot of contributors.
Interesting, good luck then! I’ll post content there if I find any
It’s hard, we probably made too many communities too quickly lol. But then again if you have a topic you’re obsessed about then it’s nice to have somewhere to post without worrying about spamming. Like I can’t just endlessly post things about The 7th Guest or Deus Ex Randomizer to a normal games community, but spamming my own communities I do get some upvotes so I guess some people enjoy these posts.
I feel like people have been conditioned by Reddit to be hesitant about making posts. There’s no reason for posting to have a high barrier of entry. Maybe we need to be more willing to post things, like people chatting in Discord.
And comments too, especially comments in old posts, Lemmy handles it way better than Reddit so feel free to drop comments in year old posts lol. Occasionally sort your feed by “New Comments” or “Active”. I have a widget on my phone’s home screen that shows my Subscribed feed sorted by New Comments. It was fun with old school forums and it’s still fun on Lemmy.
Everyone else is linking their communities so what the hell https://lemmy.mods4ever.com/communities
Also [email protected]
And I post a lot to [email protected] and [email protected] even though I’m not a mod
I’m pretty comfy and nappy on my two kbin / mbin magazines ( @[email protected] and @[email protected] ), waiting for people to arrive. Yeah, unfortunately they are like three or four layers deep within “niche of a niche of a niche of…” but what’ya gonna do? it’s the stuff that interests me that doesn’t already have tons of people going about it already (hi, Linux communities!).
Good luck with those!
Are there active generic Pokemon communities on Lemmy/Mbin? I think I’ve never seen any
Danke!
I know there are a few generic Pokémon communities on lemmy. [email protected] is the one I see more content in but 80% of the time is just news announcements. We do have [email protected] at home, too! And there’s communities for Pokémon on both kbin.social and lemmy.world but they seem to be having federation issues (or I am), as I can’t see full threads / posts from most of my instances, instead having to visit them directly.
Drive by negativity for niche communities can have a outsized chilling effect, moderation tools to help the smaller discussions grow would be useful here too.
Drive by negativity for niche communities can have a outsized chilling effect
What do you mean? Sorry English isn’t my first language
If a smaller community has people who don’t like it, they can turn that small community into a place to be negative about what that community is trying to be.
So when people want to talk about that community, they go into the post, and they see negativity, and they’re less likely to participate. They don’t want to deal with the negativity, they don’t want to deal with the naysayers
Ah indeed, makes sense. Any recent example in mind?
Fortunately he got banned since then, but I agree
Haha. I thought beehaw was all about being nice? What i heard, can’t see any of their stuff usually.
I think they try to be(e)!
I guess that’s the downside of being able to land on all with a topic posted to a niche community, which basically would never happen on reddit.
