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™""""
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.
This is kind of bullshit. On a big platform, like Reddit, where there are orders of magnitude more users, the likelihood is that there are a good number of people interested in whatever niche topic you want. That's a draw for a lot of people. I left Reddit for Lemmy for good, but we're just not up to that kind of user base.
And it's not zero effort to get a community going and keep it active, especially with a small user base. It's perfectly reasonable for someone to want a place that discusses their niche interest without wanting to be responsible for running that place. It doesn't make them bad or lazy.
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.
"Why complain about lacking a community when you can create your own ghost town"
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.
I've moderated communities before. No thanks.
Making the community doesn't mean it has any activity. There's tons of communities already made for a bunch of niche topics. None of them are being posted in. There's also communities that aren't niches that also lack activity.
!eldenring@lemmy.world only has about 3 active users, not including myself. The DLC is still pretty new and it's a massively popular game.
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.
Maybe the answer is a better search engine to find the communities.
whining about whining. classic!
Can't wait for 0 people to join my Haibane Renmei community that I don't have the experience or patience to mod, nor the understanding of the source material to justify creating it in the first place
ETA: I just searched, and found out one person already has made a Haibane Renmei community. It has one subscriber, the person who made it, who has been inactive since 2022. There are some things that simply can't be replicated in a smaller platform.
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.
That one comment on the asklemmy post radicalised my man.
Who gonna operate the sinkpissers community
During the initial mass migration from Reddit I got the impression a lot of people were starting communities on Lemmy that had been successful on Reddit but put no effort into them. I'll bet there is a statistic yet to be figured out that says you need a million platform members before you can have enough members to sustain a niche community like c/gothcountry.
No one is gonna engage lol
Sure man, lemme just real quick create a whole ass community, spend countless hours striving to attract people and moderate it when these guys try to post some horrifying shit... all that to find the location of the one missing collectible from the game that I'm currently trying to complete.
The thing is, communities need people. People who post in the community. Most new communities get a few members, a handful of posts, and then just die.
Lemmy is my niche community
communities require people. if ur the only one posting its not a community
The problem is that the niche community exist. In fact it probably exists several times, one in each instance with a small number of followers. Which makes really hard to go and decide in which community you want to invest.
It's one fundamental problem of federative systems and to be solved some of the federal nature need to be partially given away, but I think is necessary. I propose two solutions:
2 Discourage. Everytime you try to create a community that already exists in other instance a pop up appears that encourage you to just go to the other community. For already duplicated communities messages are sent to concentrate in the biggest one.
Like you've been shown that there's no simple answer over and over again here, but one problem I face hasn't been mentioned. What if I want to subscribe to communities that I can't participate in? Not every community is about hobbies, some is people talking about their life which is totally unlike mine and I like to read that. One I always pick as an example is r/arrangedmarriage. I love(d) reading that subreddit to explore a world that is so foreign to me. I'm a white woman from Europe as far removed from marriage as one could be on this earth. Why should someone follow an c/arrangedmarriage I of all people created and mod? Not everyone joins niche communities because they are directly relevant to their life.
"Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder, but don't nobody wanna lift no heavy-ass weights."
Ronnie Coleman
Can recommend. Sometimes it does really well, sometimes it doesn't. Its worth a try anytime anyways
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