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Comments

• Rottcodd@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  And like virtually every one of the similar complaints, this comes from someone who isn’t otherwise active, so basically boils down to “I’ve noticed that other people aren’t providing me with enough content. What can we do to get other people to provide me with more content?”

  If you want to get more activity in niche communities, POST! And not just once - do it again and again, day in and day out.

  The communities that you appreciate didn’t just spring into being - they grew, over time, because people did exactly that.

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  • Mojojojo1993@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Doesn’t work. If you post to a dead community it’s still dead. I see my single comment on the all feed. I think a lot like myself find going to reddit more and more. Duplicate posts by a bot or something. Really weird sexual communities and not much else

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    • otter@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I agree there is more discussion on Reddit

      Some of the Lemmy communities need some promo too. Maybe the few people subscribed don’t use those accounts anymore

      Over time as you post more stuff, people subscribe from ALL or from the crossposted communities. You can also promote the community by talking about it in tangently related posts, or !communityPromo@lemmy.ca type places

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    • CoderKat@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah. I don’t know what these “just post” types think it’s like. I tried making some relatively niche posts early on, trying to spark discussion in communities for some games I was playing. Got a single digit number of comments at most. Sometimes none. Small communities don’t get seen and niche posts in bigger communities are less likely to get votes.

      Some folks here don’t seem to want to hear it because they badly want Lemmy to be better (and I kinda get that), but where niche communities are concerned, Reddit is unfortunately better.

      Also, the “jUsT PoSt” replies are acting like everyone wants to post. Not everyone does and we shouldn’t be acting like they’re idiots because they don’t want to be the one to make the posts. It’s perfectly valid to want to read other people’s posts. There’s also some stuff you just can’t post and expect it to work. Eg, I read episode discussions on Reddit. Those can really only take off if you post them immediately when the episode airs. It feels like only Star Trek has those here. For every other show, I just go back to Reddit.

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  • otter@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yea some of the communities I’m helping with just didn’t exist before we spun them up in the past few months. They’re fairly niche

    There are other niche communities that I’m curious about and would like to see more from, but I don’t have experience in those areas to know what’s interesting/ relevant. I post what I can, but there are probably others that can do it better

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    • snowstorm@feddit.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I agree with this. And with the OP. And I haven’t even read their whole post, making this even more legit in a way. Post!

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  • ChasingEnigma@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    [deleted]

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    • ttmrichter@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Is this the new version of “the lurkers support me in email”?

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  • pacology@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I agree with you. That’s why I make an effort to at least leave a comment every time I use the app.

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• IonAddis@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Your account has 4 posts over a few months and one comment. Maybe you have actually been using Lemmy for longer on another account, but we can’t see that.

  I’m an Elder Millennial, used to admin/mod a fandom forum around 1999-2002ish. A small percentage of active users essentially carrying the content of small niche communities on their back until ignition happens has ALWAYS been how communities work. It’s like that in real life, and it’s like that online. It was like that when niche message boards and forums reigned in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was like that on usenet, in IRC, on email groups. It was like that on World of Warcraft, when you tried to get a guild off the ground for raiding or something. It’s like that here on Lemmy, because Lemmy is a social platform too.

  The only real solution to grow a community is to jump in and create content yourself, to help communities along until one or two ignite and take off. You have to participate yourself to change the culture, not just bitch in a post that it’s “changed” and that you’re going to stomp off if it doesn’t “change back”. (Although, that type of post is, admittedly, also a tradition as old as time.)

  Anyway. Communities starting small and needing people to grow is just…a thing. This is how volunteer organizations work in real life–why do you think they’re constantly pleading for other people to get involved? Because you need people who actually pull on their adult pants and get in and do the work of organizing things, doing things, instead of sitting about like a lump consuming it.

  You can move back to reddit of course, if you want. That’s similar to moving from a small town to a big city for the night life, which people do. Maybe you don’t have the time or energy to essentially “volunteer” your time on a small community to help it grow.

  But the thing you’re complaining about is…just part of how communities work. Communities have always revolved around a few people contributing most of the content until the community takes off (or doesn’t).

  So, rationally, what’s the next step? Stepping up your own contributions, or going off somewhere else?

  Only you can decide because only you know your IRL time commitments. But one action is going to be more useful to helping niche subs get off the ground than the other.

  (Here’s something interesting: The Frugal sub has a shit-load of people subscribed who eagerly jump in feet-first if you start a relevant topic. Why doesn’t someone here with an interest in that sub go over there and start a post?)

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  • scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah I’d say the only thing more regular than the 10 people maintaining the stream of content here on lemmy are the people who don’t post/comment but complaint about the lack of content.

    I’m personally trying to hold up 3 niche communities right now. All of them have over 300 followers, but in each one an average of 2-3 people post. Be the change you want to be. At least jump in and comment.

    And a lot of them are easy. New game update goes up? Post the new update. Are you excited about it? Plants your thing? Take a picture of it. Music subs? What are you listening to today? Just post something. It’s not like we have karma to worry about

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  • ChasingEnigma@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    [deleted]

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    • density@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Tbh i thinknthroaways are a better solution. "Hiding" stuff selectively can never 100% work.

      The reason i prefered reddit to all the other big socials was how easy pseudonynous activity is. No "real name policy" BS. threadiverse has the same feature so i like it too.

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    • rip_art_bell@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Agreed. It’s one of the more creepy aspects of social media that mostly leads to “gotchas” (“oh your account is only 2 months old? your opinion is invalid!”) and stalker-ish behavior – and one I wish fediverse had learned from instead of copied.

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• JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  where people downvote reasonable opinions they disagree with

  This is the scourge of any forum. Downvoting apologists need to think about what they are doing. Downvoting makes comments less visible. So downvoting is the equivalent of taping someone’s mouth shut because you don’t agree with them. Is that really what you are trying to do?

  Personally I never downvote any comment that is made in good faith, no matter how much I disagree with it. Occasionally I even force myself to upvote them if they’re thoughtful. It’s not that hard.

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  • antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Downvoting makes comments less visible. So downvoting is the equivalent of taping someone’s mouth shut because you don’t agree with them. Is that really what you are trying to do?

    This is ridiculous, especially the comparison with physical violence. Upvoting a comment also makes all the other comments less visible, by promoting the comment you’ve picked, taking up the place where some other comment could’ve been. Nobody’s mouth is taped shut by either upvoting or downvoting, all the comments are still visible, it’s just that their order will be determined by the upvotes and downvotes - and removing the latter from the equation won’t negate the “discrimination” (comment sorting) created by the former.

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    • The_Vampire@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah, I think some forums had the right idea with reactions of sorts (funny/helpful/informative/etc.) and being able to sort and sift through comments via those reactions.

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  • Zak@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Slashdot had a good idea for this wherein votes were combined with a small set of reasons for a positive or negative vote. I think the use of those reasons was optional there, but modern systems might do well to adopt mandatory reasons for votes. If the reasons for negative votes are limited to things like “off-topic”, “hostility”, and the like, it could cut down on inappropriate downvotes.

    Of course some people might still select inappropriate reasons, but a small nudge like that can have a big impact on aggregate behavior.

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    • density@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Should still include "i dont like it" as a reason

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  • lemmyingly@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I only downvote toxic ass holes.

    I wish I could turn off seeing the voting system because I think the voting system is meaningless. No matter the topic there will always be people who are uneducated and have a lack of experience in it upvote an incorrect comment to the moon, whilst the person who is trying to share their in depth knowledge on the subject get downvoted to the bottom of the earth. So it becomes an echo chamber of the most popular opinions.

    In Reddit’s wiki they state that the voting system should be used to upvote relevant conversation that adds to the topic and downvote practically everything else. So it should be a self regulating system to filter out nonsense. But most people use it as an agree/like, disagree/dislike system and it appears people have brought that philosophy over to Lemmy.

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    • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I wish I could turn off seeing the voting system because I think the voting system is meaningless.

      Completely agree. This is how Hacker News does it.

      IMO a first step is to get rid of the downvote counter. On a healthy forum a comment will generally have far more upvotes than downvotes. So it seems to me that showing the exact number of downvotes is putting disproportionate weight on the negativity. 400 upvotes but 9 people downvoted it, what bast***s! You often see this kind of indignant comment, which suggests that people love to focus on the negative if given the chance. We should not be pushing people to focus on this number. It’s completely counterproductive if the objective is quality and not just mindless engagement.

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• DmMacniel@feddit.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The solution would be to be more active. Fediverse and the experience in it is in your hands. And if you don’t give anything others won’t do either and we get nowhere. I don’t know where I saw it but it’s some internet law regarding communities: 90% of all users are lurkers 9% are commentors and 1% are posters. In regards to Lemmy those percents translate to very few “content creators” (on reddit as it’s bigger it’s way better).

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  • Microw@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Squabbles had a really good approach in this to motivate lurkers to comment and post. I don’t see a similar coordinated effort for that here.

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    • Die4Ever@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      How did they do that?

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• Synthead@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  There was an explosion of users when Reddit went Monopoly Man over their API. It makes sense that usage will waver a bit for a while, and that not all people will stick. Lemmy is like Reddit, but it doesn’t have full parity to it.

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• Ashtear@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  What are some examples of niche communities that are declining?

  Granted, I’ve only been here since the reddit migration, but after a short chaotic period, I’ve only seen growth in the communities I’ve been an active participant in.

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  • Mojojojo1993@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’ve seen a decline since the initial jump. I moved over from Reddit. It was exciting new and fresh. That’s basically gone now and things are stagnating. I’m constantly going back to Reddit as there’s no discussion here. Half the time I’m the only one commenting on posts. It’s dead

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    • Ashtear@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      No discussion? In the past few days you’ve commented in !games@lemmy.world and !technology@lemmy.world, two of the most active discussion communities on Lemmy. And you’re getting it here.

      You also don’t have any posts in over three weeks and 13 in total over five months. People, if you want more active niche communities, you need to contribute to the discussion. You’re not going to be able to passively, endlessly doomscroll here. That level of content may never arrive, but there’s still plenty to build. Sure, it could be easier, with duplicate communities all over the place and defederation on the rise. For now, use Lemmy Explorer to see where the activity is and help us build those smaller communities.

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• Emperor@feddit.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I don’t know what the solution is on a platform level

  It’s not really Lemmy’s problem, using “All” on a large instance like l.w is going to get you blasted in the face with a barrage of low effort posts, that’s just the nature of the beast.

  I’m on a smaller instance (they’re all smaller than l.w which is the size of the top 50 other instances combined) and use subscriptions to manage what I see and it works out nicely.

  On Lemmy (and most of the rest of the Fediverse) there aren’t, yet, fancy algorithms serving you a bespoke selection posts that filter out a lot of the “noisier” communities and boost the more interesting ones. You have to get out there and curate your own feed, it’s pretty easy but whenever I see a post complaining that there’s too much about Linux or too many memes it’s clear that the OP isn’t taking (m)any steps to improve their feed.

  I’ve noticed a significant decline in the niche communities that were originally active

  Niche communities can often only have one or two people posting regular content. If no-one else chips in or replies then that can be a dispiriting experience and that’s how communities die. If there’s a community you like then drop in, comment, make a post from time to time. That’s how communities gain momentum and start thriving.

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• Aux@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  My main issue on Lemmy is lack of moderation, which drives many people away. Let’s take a look at c/technology:

  • Scottish minister blames sons watching football for £11,000 iPad roaming bill
  • The reincarnation of totaled Teslas—in Ukraine | Ars Technica
  • Elon Musk vows ‘thermonuclear lawsuit’ as advertisers flee X over antisemitism

  WTF is this crap? How’s that related to technology? Just because some dork used an iPad, that doesn’t mean it’s tech news worthy.

  Lemmy is flooded by bots who post all the crap they can find crawling the media. Niche communities simply disappear from the main page and fade away over time.

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• ChillingGoats@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  its obvious that things more people like, i.e. memes and whatnot, will grow faster and take a larger spot on any platform. that is normal and unavoidable.

  small communities are small and hinge on people staying active in them, which they often stop being when everything is said and done. they dont regenerate as much as say, a meme community which has high visibility and low barrier of entreance.

  i’d love to hear what niche communities you actually mean, i always find it sus when people make a reasonable sounding point, then move on to ‘unpopular opinions get downvotes’ and are afraid to actually name what kind of unpopular opinions they mean. meme and shitposting growing and vague unpopular opinions being unpopular ultimately aren’t related.

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  • BluesF@feddit.uk ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Haha, good point. I can’t say I find, for example, Nazi views being downvoted a bad thing, no matter how reasonably they are presented.

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• Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I mean, if you’re browsing all you can’t be surprised there’s a lot of crap you don’t care about. That’s what the subscribed feed is for.

  All is practically useless when most instances uses that auto subscribe to every community on every instance bot. Just on my test community on my own instance which is there only for testing bugs and other crap, there’s 73 subscribers and 72 of them are those auto subscribe to everything bots. Now I run some tests on that community and I get downvotes and even spam reports on them, from people seeing it on All.

  So, no wonder All is crap. It includes all the spammy meme communities and even test communities nobody in their right mind would even think subscribing to. The small communities you talk about are probably still there, just drowned in All. Subscribe to them, default to subscribed feed and you’ll be good to go.

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• DarkMessiah@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s the kind of thing that happens when a space gets big - the original purpose and culture of that space is gradually diluted and overwritten by what’s popular until it’s been washed away completely and is no different than what it was trying to distinguish itself from.

  Frankly, it’s a phenomenon that I think the world could do without, but I can’t do much about it until the next harvest blood moon, when my powers are at their peak.

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• livus@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Yeah, I'm not having that experience. I think you need to be a bit more selective with blocks to curate your all.

  Also you're on the most reddit-mainstream of the instances, maybe you should move somewhere smaller and sort by local every so often.

  Kbin communities are having new life breathed into them lately, by an update that allows us to automatically remove inactive owners from communities.

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• Die4Ever@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  if you want to browse c/All then I think you might want to ban some of the meme communities

  also v0.19.0 is adding the Scaled sorting method, which should help you see those niche communities more again

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  • livus@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This is the way. I just block all the biggest meme communities and my all isn't memey. All sorted by new is still a great way to find things.

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• vsh@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Lemmy is full of reddit users if you like it or not. This “reddit” mentality was simply transferred here.

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• NightOwl@lemmy.one ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I never found “all” browsable for any platform whether it be lemmy, YouTube, or reddit. It’s why subscribing has been so important to me, and filtering. Like on YouTube which I access through freetube I’ve disabled “trending” and “popular” since even the thumbnails were obnoxious for majority of the videos. And on reddit what even made /r/all viewable was a reddit enhancement suite filter lists that was in the hundreds for constant blocking of communities, and even then was a wack a mole that required keyword filtering.

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  • Tygr@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I just tried using all, wow, I didn’t realize the fediverse had declined this much. It’s worse than a 250k member Facebook meme group that’s been abandoned.

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    • NightOwl@lemmy.one ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’ve had to block off entire instances too which I use the Connect app for.

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• HolyDiver@aussie.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  it’s becoming “redditified”

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• JimboDHimbo@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This is why I have an alt account on at least one of the instances that most of the reddit migration people hated on via “can we defederate from ___” posts, en masse. And I was part of the reddit migration. I found that shit weird af.

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  • IndiBrony@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah it’s not polite to go into someone’s house and demand they star rearranging the furniture because you don’t like it.

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• 0x4E4F@infosec.pub ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  But over time, the communities I liked have faded as shitposting and meme communities have come to dominate the platform.

  That is perfectly normal with almost any social media platform, forums included.

  There seems to be more of a herd mentality now, where people downvote reasonable opinions they disagree with.

  This seems to be because of the large number of US selfcentered liberals that decided to stick to the platform after the Reddit migration. There is no solution for that. Everyone has a voice on the internet.

  The discussions don’t feel as nuanced.

  Agreed.

  Some people have even been attacked for innocuous comments that don’t align with the prevailing groupthink.

  Mhm, keep going…

  I want Lemmy to succeed, but right now I’m finding myself drawn back to Reddit because the niche communities there seem more active.

  The dust settled down, most people moved back to Reddit. This was inevitable. Change is a hard thing for most people, even more so when you have to deal with a completely different set of rules and choices you previously had no control over (like choosing an instance).

  I’ll keep checking in, but Lemmy needs to recapture its original spirit if I’m going to make it my main home.

  Don’t mean to bust your balls, but this will probably never happen. There will be ups and downs in the user count on Lemmy and the fediverse, based on how bad the other commercial social media platforms are doing, but a significant spike?.. as with the Reddit migration?.. not likely. That was a one time thing, and it only happened because this was never tried before. Now that it has, this will likely not be a viable alternative for most people that want to migrate. Hosting my own seever, paying fees or doing it on a someone else’s server, just so that it goes down and takes down the content with it 🤨. Trust me, this is not an option most people are OK with. People like stability and sustainability (especially in niche communities, memes and shitpoats don’t need that at all) and that is one thing that the fediverse can’t give them… unless you host your own instance… but then you have to pay fees 😒.

  Bottom line, Lemmy and the fediverse is good for tech enthusiasts, nothing more. If everyone on the planet knew how to configure and run and Linux seever, docker and all that, 90% of TLDs were free, yes, it will most probably trive, but if any of these conditions are not met… probably not.

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  • ShitOnABrick@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This is incredibly well-put and true.its a shame really as well. With the current state of lemmy it’s only going see a downward spiral

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    • 0x4E4F@infosec.pub ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      There was a peak, everyone enjoyed it, it was fun (for about 2 or 3 months)… then people started realizing this will probably never be a true place for niche stuff and started to go back to Reddit… plus mods started to abuse power, instances strted defederating in bulk whoever they see fit (which is not what the fediverse is all about… it should be a last resort 🤦), which of course pissed off users (let’s face it, if you’re on Reddit, you can see all of Reddit, not just parts of it). Now, there isn’t a single instance that isn’t defederated with at least one other instance. That and instances going dark over nigh (you go to sleep, can’t log in the next day, find out that your instance is lost on cyberspace)… yeah, that kinda tipped the scale for normies I think.

      As I said, it’s good enough for techies, but normal users, nah… they want stability. They wanna be able to find a post that they posted 10 years ago and link to it. On Lemmy… there is no guarantee for that, especially if you’re on a smaller instance.

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