My niche community didn’t exist, so I just made it myself and started posting. Be that change you want to see.
Comment on Six months after the initial reddit surge (graphs)
magnetosphere@kbin.social 10 months ago
My sympathies to anyone who has to use reddit because their niche community either doesn’t have enough activity or doesn’t exist at all.
I’m more of a casual user who’s just here for the news and memes, so fortunately I don’t have that problem.
FireTower@lemmy.world 10 months ago
sbv@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
You’ve got a pretty cool community. I enjoy every one of your posts.
FireTower@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Thanks! User engagement is what keeps me going. Otherwise it feels like I’m just talking into a void.
magnetosphere@kbin.social 10 months ago
THIS is the way to do it! Nice work!
FireTower@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Thanks! !forgottenweapons@lemmy.world has been around for about a month and we’re almost at 1k members!
magnetosphere@kbin.social 10 months ago
lol that’s YOU?!? !forgottenweapons showed up randomly in my feed one day, and I subscribed because it’s unique and interesting! Awesome!
Poem_for_your_sprog@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That takes a small amount of effort. Can you just create my niche communities for me?
FireTower@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Sure. But only if your niche community is centered around a YouTube channel run by a man with a three musketeers looking mustache and ponytail who travels the globe to disassemble military prototypes.
Poem_for_your_sprog@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That sounds pretty fun. Does he do UFOs too?
SacrificedBeans@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I miss my niche communities, but I don’t have my app anymore soooo. Tough for me, tougher for spez.
troyunrau@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
In that case, I recommend !tenforward@lemmy.world ;)
magnetosphere@kbin.social 10 months ago
Subbed! Thanks!
notasandwich1948@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
sadly even things like memes were better on Reddit, maybe I could do something to change that
troyunrau@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Okay, more serious answer. You look like you’re on kbin, so I don’t know if this applies – nevertheless.
On Lemmy 0.19, the Scaled sort algorithm is such a good improvement over (Hot/All/Top/…) that existed prior to 0.19. It’s basically a Hot sort, but it’s weighted by community size. So if you’re subscribed to a small community, that gets one post a week, it’s still likely to end up in your feed. I’ve noticed a huge improvement when switching to it as my default sort – suddenly that weird music community I subbed to, but never noticed any of the posts – is in my feed. Etc.
Lemmy.world is still on 0.18, but when they upgrade (I have no information on that process) I suspect that people should be switching to it as their default sort for a better experience if they’re into niche topics.
Aurelius@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I chatted with the lemmy.world folks about a month or so ago and they mentioned that 0.19 wasn’t fully stable yet. The Lemmy instances being split is a real pain for app developers lol can’t wait till this gets resolved tbh
deweydecibel@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That’s cool and all, but sorting is only part of the issue.
The other part is that they’re simply aren’t enough people here yet. That will change with time, of course, I’m not too concerned about that.
Hopefully the sorting will help over time, though.
blueson@feddit.nu 10 months ago
Decenteralized systems in all it’s glory, but I think at some point we will need to address or come up with a solution on how we market niche communities.
In reddit it was so simple to find your communities. Let’s say you grew interest in Balisongs, then you just type r/balisong and there you are. This helps discovery immensly.
Doing this on a lemmy instance will only get you to that instance community. Which means you might have like 10 of these already niche communities spread out around different instances.
Personally I’d think a system where an instance can promote or assign another instance community as the “main” one, with some type of backup feature, would help Lemmy grow.
But I also think that opinion is controversial considering the nature of a decentralized system.
nutomic@lemmy.ml 10 months ago
You can find communities on lemmyverse.net/communities
Vex_Detrause@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
So you’re saying I should try Hot sort now? Hmm. Let’s see.
flames5123@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I still need to put in the work to sub to all the alternatives. I had hundreds of subs and my front page was so curated. But now on Lemmy, I tried Hot for new/fresh content, but I have to browse Active most of the time due to the amount of just single up vote posts on Hot.
I just wish we had more people. I’m doing my part of being active though!
troyunrau@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Even if you find alternatives to all your reddit communities, they might be empty placeholder communities. Someone needs to get the content kicked off in them.
Admittedly it’s not just a lemmy problem. Small reddit subs sometimes have the same issue. My specific field of science is called geophysics. I stopped posting to r/geophysics during the API protest – it was already pretty quiet, and I previously accounted for a significant amount of the content/chatter. But after I stopped posting, what remains is conspiracy theory nonsense mostly. Well, normally I’d report that, but now I’m just watching reddit burn. Started !geophysics@lemmy.ca and it’s just as quiet in there, with mostly me posting… but hey, if I’m going to scream into an empty void, it might as well be here :)
magnetosphere@kbin.social 10 months ago
Hey, cool! I didn’t know about Scaled sorting. Thanks again!