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™””“”
I mean, really, I just want other people to be moderating it even if I’m the only one posting stuff. Ain’t nobody got time for dat!
For real, there are people who will volunteer to do that, to help a community get off the ground. See !fedigrow@lemm.ee.
I did. There’s almost zero engagement. My most popular thread is a meta narrative about me being in there talking to myself. There were at least two other attempts that are even more inactive. Not enough of y’all are into synthesizers.
For curiosity, where did you advertise the community? In the “new communities”/“find a community” communities? In music-related communities? Or both?
Hmm. I made no effort to advertise at all. I came during the Rexodus last year after the API kerfuffle. Initially, it seemed promising, and I didn’t think I’d need to, but activity died down quite quickly. I’ve never moderated a community before or anything like that. I certainly don’t want to it to become a full time job. I have enough of those.
We need better discoverable tools. I subscribed to the community
Welcome!
😄😁👋
I’d never seen this community before. Subscribed!
I’m terrible at keyboards, but I do like to play with 'em.
Welcome to the club!
Same! On all those things
No one is gonna engage lol
Doesn’t matter. Even if it get only 3 or 4 upvotes still doesn’t fucking matter. Just create a community and flood it with content.
How about no, that sounds super depressing
Why would I do that? That doesn’t get anyone what they want
Pretty much what I’m doing at !amiga@sopuli.xyz
I’d call that a “webpage” though, one with an ill-fitting name. One person with a sandwich board and a megaphone yelling at a few passers by who at best smile, give a half-hearted thumbs up, then walk away.
To me, for it to live up to the name “community” that implies several people sharing stuff and a bit of reciprocity.
Of course that might take time, the first poster might be one of those proverbial people planting those trees that they’re never going benefit fron the shade of. Theres no harm in just creating it making a few posts and leaving them there- it might become active eventually. But it could be never and it will inevitably take a lot longer if the platform only has a million users a day total than if it had a billion.
You can probably do some sort of critical-mass / chain-reaction / markov chain type model to get a handle on the chances of a niche community becoming active in small population. Like that ‘Drake equation’ for trying to stop people wasting resources on SETI.
I don’t know if someone is even upvoting your post and in a while replying to it. I consider it as engagement. Sorry, I am GenZ. So, I have different definition of online community.
You’ll be lucky to get a couple up votes.
It’s like streaming with no viewers, only the activity you’ve doing isn’t something fun you’d be doing anyways, eg gaming
!stardewvalley@lemm.ee got pretty active in a few days
Going against the post’s spirit, but…If you’re not finding a community for your interests (or only finding abandoned/inactive ones), and don’t want to create one (or try to get existing ones going), you’re welcome over in !general@lemmy.world. Post about whatever, find likeminded folks, then if ya think there’s enough of ya, you can make a separate community without it being one person posting into a void.
Also there’s !justpost@lemmy.world. Similar vibes.
This probably has a much higher accuracy rate.
The culture is not conducive here; Lemmings have no chill.
Can recommend. Sometimes it does really well, sometimes it doesn’t. Its worth a try anytime anyways
Yes! It is worth a try!
Making a community also implies moderating it, doesn’t it? I would understand that there are people who just want to see and post things they like and not have to be aware of banning users or deleting unwanted posts.
I say that because I am part of those people, moderating content is hard.
I don’t want to say that it is easy, because it is actuall effort you have to put in, but moderating a community, especally if it is very niche and small is not that hard.
I can understand people not wanting to do some stuff, but I much more respect “I don’t want to modding so I make a community and ask someone to be with me on a mod team when stuff is going to get overwhelming, and focus on other stuff within community” than “I dont want to do modding so I’m going to just sit there and wait while other people do it for me”
Not for free.
As a man whose started 7 different communities I’d like to defend those people saying, if you don’t immediately get a good response it starts feeling like screaming into the void.
I started a meme community !aneurysmposting@sopuli.xyz and it immediately took off and is doing well. On the other hand other my worst community got 2-3 people making one or two comments after a month of 2 posts everyday.
Meme communities do well. Niche communities require lots of people finding it and being active.
deleted by creator
The funny thing is, if you don’t fit into the culture (or even just disagree with moderation) people tell you to go start your own. Which is like telling you to go sit in a corner by yourself.
Y=x^2 lmao
The comments on that post genuinely made my day.
Damnit
But even aneurysmposting, the most successful wouldn’t survive if I wasn’t regularly posting. Partially bc people just forget a community exists. I end up posting in the same 10-15 communities since I can’t think of relevant communities to post in; even if they exist very often.
I enjoy running aneurysmposting and !inmymind@lemmy.dbzer0.com since there only I can post and there is no pressure. It basically is like posting to local, but I have an archive if everything I post.
Similarly !shortstories@literature.cafe is another community I made and enjoy posting on, but my posts are like 50% of that instance and 80% of that community. But its a great community otherwise.
The other 4 have been different levels of disappointing.
I feel you as I too struggled to keep small community afloat and alive. And it sometimes does feel like you are screaming in to the void. I was kinda fortunate in a sense that my community got atleast some trafficin votes/comments and that motivated me to stay and post.
My point is that it’s always better to try to do something (even if it fails) than just whine about it.
I also want to salute you (and people like you), we are all here in part because you take time of your day to find\make and post stuff. Even if in the moment it doesen’t get noticed or feels like it’s in vain, know that it is never for nothing - you’re making the hour\day or even week of 100s of people better
Comments come in which keeps the motivation. The issue is if I’m busy for a week or month I come back to a dead community. (And I’m not gonna use a not to keep regular activity, that idea grosses me out.)
But yeah I do think a lot more people could try and perhaps don’t go super niche, but try making a community for a genre or subgenre. Music will get more traction than folk music which will get more traction than Bob Dylan and yet you can post the same thing you want from the niche in the other 2.
PS. This is the kind of situation where you should link your community so people like me can join in.
Hey fam, go to !fedigrow@lemm.ee and check out the weekly “How are you doing with your communities?” post if you haven’t already. It’s like a support group for people keeping niche communities alive.
Hi my name is variants and I’m a niche community mod
starts sobbing
Oh yeah I gotta go do that sometime
And still, the community I started ( !dontdeadopeninside@lemmy.ohaa.xyz ) somewhat exists alongside it. Although Im afraid you’ve won.
Well you started later and used a reddit import as a template which people can be a little averse to. But the community is doing really well and you’ve taken good care of it. Keep it up mate!
I would contribute to my niche community, but my foreskin was severed without my consent, so…
The problem isn’t that they won’t create them, there’s insufficient biomass to populate them.
If I want to talk about a 5-year-old video game with myself, I’ll just open Notepad.
Just how much biomass does a subthread really need?
Well, the sub in question had one person copying the articles from Reddit and me commenting on them. That was decidedly too few :)
Philosophically, I think you need enough engagement that there’s chat at least a few times a week in the group. Anything less than that and it’s closer to a search engine result than a community.
Feel free to drop a post on !oldgamers@lemmy.world if you want to talk old games.
As @Zombiepirate@lemmy.world said in a comment here, we can use general communities to find “biomass needed” to populate small communities
Although I can see the point you are making, and I agree to some extent. I still think it is better to try
I totally agree, and I did try. It was just some kind of soul reposting things from Reddit and me.
“Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder, but don’t nobody wanna lift no heavy-ass weights.”
Ronnie Coleman
Been posting to “Europe” since forever. Still only a fraction of users compared to that other site. About 3000 monthly I believe. Driving engagement is harder than it seems.
Yep, be the change you want to see in the world.
Also, making communities is fun! I made !cartographyanarchy@lemm.ee and it is booming thanks to several lemmings who I got to post consistently. Shout out to thepiccardmanuever.
Well, I’ve been trying to put some content on !fgc@lemmy.world and !mahjong@lemmy.nerdcore.social, but there’s been almost no engagement. I can’t imagine it’d be worth even trying to start communities for even more niche topics than that.
Clicking the “Create a Community” button doesn’t magically spawn an audience of people who share my hobbies and want to post about them.
