raze2012

but the millions of small niches are lacking still

Even Reddit didn't fully solve that problem. When you go outside of the general topics it an be surprising how slow activity can be. That's simply the nature of the niche.

There's no real way to solve that without simply being that change yourself. Because those niches tend to have the 2-3 same users posting half or more of the discussions or links.

Well that's the sad reality. I don't think most people want to move. They are hoping reddit fixes itself or at least compromises on their plans. I was in that same boat myself during the first blackout way back in 2015.

Ofc, I saw over 8 years how they proceeded to do almost none of their promises, implement actual user centric features when the loudest subs literally broke reddit, and threw in a bunch of stuff no one asked for: crappy video player, hiding QoL behind a paywall, polls that barely work on old reddit, adding NFTs over a year after the internet went to war with the concept?

Yeah, I'm a very patient man, but around 2019 I realized not much was going to change. And the coup dtat is that the communities themsselves have gotten more and more polarized over time. I remember a time where I could at least lightly touch into some political issues as long as I stick to smaller subs. During my last days (around the time blocks updated to be much worse) I was being blocked for correcting grammatical errors. Not minor stuff, stuff that would fundamentally change the meaning of their sentence.

So yea, I've given up. But it took me years after my "breaking point" and I'm sure for others they will be in the same boat

some of those mods are likely thinking that moving would destroy the community they worked so hard to manage

they aren't wrong. It will massively deflate their community. That's an ineivtability of how lurkers on the internet work. They aren't there for community, they are there for easy passive browsing.

What can we do to help them transition?

"we" as in the common person? It won't be a fast track. There will need to be a steady supply of content for a certain topic, and a stream of discussion. Unfortunately the best way to help as a single person is to basically become that sweaty forever online person. The first step to the Network Effect is to generate enough content to engage with.

If "we" have developers or artists that can be one bigger step to help out. contribute to making apps and extensions to either bridge the gap or overcome current shortcomings of these federated instances. Even amongst techy communities there is a lot of confusion to how instances work. So some app to make it dead simple to browse and comment (while later allowing options for power users) is key. Sync committing to working with Lemmy/KBin is definietly a bit help.

Most of the rest is up to the instance admins. SEO, improving features, getting good moderatiors, etc. None of that is in out control, we can only give feedback