Like others, I came over when Reddit was banning 3rd party apps. Many communities were being started and I wanted to help. So I chose one community to form here and try and grow. And we did! There was a time a short while in the little KC Chiefs community was in the top 100 communities on Lemmy world. I knew that wouldn’t last that we would be outpaced by many more broad appeal communities but I didn’t predict the reverse in engagement growth that has come. Stagnation sure, I didn’t think Lemmy was going to surpass reddit for a long while yet, but not the barren communities of today. Meme communities and the “small gripe” adjacent communities are doing fine, but it seems all others have shrunk. I tried to keep the Kerbal Space Program community active for a bit but had to return to the official forums and even subreddit for discussion. The post I made in the Go community here remains the only post in the community.

A platform led by a CEO who edits comments of users, lies about other professionals and then double downs on the lie when proven to be a liar can’t be trusted. And in general I prefer the decentralized open source backbone of Lemmy to the ad ridden, rage bait and bug filled Reddit. I’d love for this to be my full time home for discussing my niche interests but that’s not possible without others engaging with the content.

I posted a lot in the beginning, tried to comment a lot too but now it feels like talking to myself when I make a new post in the community I started and get few or no responses. What can be done? Community specific advice is nice, but I’m looking more for Lemmy World level solutions as I’m sure there’s many many other niche communities I’m not apart of experiencing the same thing.

  • Ziggurat@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    1 year ago

    IMO, where lemmy is right now. Niche communities are counter productive. Especially as there is often 3 times the same niche communities on 3 different instances.

    Try to talk about your niche content in a larger community. Talk about Oshi no ko in a generic manga/anime community. Try to talk about Kult RPG in a generic rpg community. Talk about french politics in a general France/Europe community.

    Today we have generic community with like 10 posts a day and under them a bunch of niches with a post per week. Uf you move these posts to the general community above you now get 15 posts a day.

    Content is what drags users, not yet another niche community.

    Lemmy is still on the verge of usability, there is few very engaged user who make a large fraction of the content. Keeping it alive, but if in 6 month they have less time some /c will deperish

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
    0·
    1 year ago

    I really just think the reddit/lemmy structure isn’t very suited to small communities.

    For small communities we should have a platform structured like a traditional web forum with flat threads and thread bumping. This causes people to get endless streams of discussion even with relatively few users.