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™””“”
Then post into the void until some other like-minded degenerate finds you. You need to create the meeting point!
Thanks! I’m currently going through my hobbies and I’m gonna start posting and subbing to all of them.
You’re right, I should be posting more if I want engagement.
This is the lifecycle of internet forums
“I’m sick of this place, I’m going somewhere new!” > “This place is deserted” > “Let’s diversify and get more users” > “There are more users but they are all posting content I’m not interested in” > “I’m sick of this place, I’m going somewhere new!”
I’ve been through at least half a dozen such cycles, it’s just a normal part of life when you live vicariously through an ethernet cable. Lemmy will grow, get old, go to shit, and die, and half the population will move somewhere else. Probably Pylon.
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.
Counterpoint: Sometimes you can kickstart a community that you want to see just by consistently posting content. !science_memes@mander.xyz is my favourite example – it was essentially one person who created that entire community (and it’s since been diversifying somewhat – at least there’s traction in the comments).
But to reinforce your point: I did !spacemusic@lemmy.ca and tried to do the same thing, but it sort of petered out. But it’s way way more niche.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. Just engage with the content you like and build some places for content you’d like to see.
We’re complaining because we don’t want to be the ones to post, lol.
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.
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.
This did remind me to create a community for the one subreddit I used the most before I left reddit, r/jakeandamir. Thank you, I did that today!
You just reminded me to post in this new community I joined recently, so thank you.
I will not whine about the lack of this niche community, because both c/Indiana and c/Indiana@midwest.social exist, but boy do I wish they were even close to as active as r/Indiana was when I was on Reddit.
There is just not a good place to discuss state politics that I can find and I learned a lot through discussion.
“Why complain about lacking a community when you can create your own ghost town”
Exactly
Someone has already created my niche community, and there are 2 people in it, and it hasn’t grown since I joined, and that makes the conversations in it boring af
Maybe the answer is a better search engine to find the communities.
I don’t even know how to find new communities that aren’t part of my instance. Is there some place that just lists them by date created?
Lemmy Explorer will do it…I think. “Newest publish time” sort is what you’re looking for, I think.
On my instance you just click “Communities” at the top and it gives you a list of communities with three options at the top Subscribed/Local/All just like the main feed. Click all and you can browse or search the list of all communities, though the search is not great.
Your instance does need to know about these communities existing first though. For recently created communities on another instance that might not be the case. Which is where services like Lemmy Explorer help.
whoa, Lemmy explorer is a great resource, thanks!
That would certainly help.
For someone whose major gripe is whining you sure seem to do a lot of it.
I take offense to it because you’re suggesting that the problem is us, and not the system which resulted in empty communities
I keep looking where on my local ATM machine that I can exchange internet points to ducats
doubloons would be acceptable likewise as well
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.
Post something and see if you can stir up activity?
Modding a niche Lemmy community is a breeze, honestly
Not much is happening, but not many troublemakers, either. Modding is pretty much zero effort.
Haibane Renmei
I had to look this up, is it Lain adjacent? Very similar artworks.
Very Lain adjacent! Yoshitoshi Abe did the character design for Serial Experiments Lain before making Haibane Renmei. There are many Lain fans in the Haibane community
I don’t think there are any" rant" communities?
Lemmy needs that kind of large general topic community to redirect users to smaller niches communities.
I too also wouldn’t want to mod it, but I think it’d be great for herding up angry lemmy users sharing the same frustrations, so they could be redirected or start new communities for the particular topic.
The reason is that everyone enjoy reading and writing rants about something, so the rant community will automatically grow many subscribers coming in from all kinds of searches.
For example, a user ranting about “womens pants without pockets” would get much more engagement than someone just creating and posting about a community for womens pants. The rant comment section would also already often include the potential users for a new community.
The general discussion doesn’t really cut it, because it’s too nice and polite and weird angry rants don’t really fit in there.
The thing is that (also in real life) when someone needs something bad enough, they’ll get angry, and that anger can be channeled into something useful, because they’re willing to collaborate with others who can help them or who at least supports them.
I mean, that redirection then needs to work. At the moment, nobody in the Movie/TV communities is redirecting me to a specific TV show community saying “hey this exists, you can also post there”. Etc etc.
