I run a regional instance (lemmy.pt, for Portugal and the Portuguese language) and I definitely feel the hardships of Lemmy being so small. It's very hard to grow more specialized communities when the overall pull of the platform is so small, since most people looking for ""niche"" topics would rather stick to the bigger communities on Reddit and whatnot instead of opting for the tiny thing going on the Fediverse.
Yeah, hopefully! The instance exists since 2021 and we're still small, even with the 2022 Reddit blackout. A lot of people registered then, but quickly realized Reddit was still bigger and went back. It's a shame, but I'll keep it running for as long as I can.
Even on reddit, PT subs are hard to get active. There is /r/Portugal, literaciafinanceira and maybe devpt. I think you are stretching too thin.
Have you thought of just doing 1 sub on Lemmy.pt, and just add [tags] in the title or something? Once Lemmy.pt has enough users, you could slowly open more.
Yeah, sure. That's because we're also fairly small and Reddit isn't really that popular, especially among older folks.
Regarding the 1 sub, I don't think the issue is having too many communities, seeing as !portugal@lemmy.pt serves as a main hub and has pretty loose restrictions already. The issue is more of the overall visibility of Lemmy paired with the low usage of Reddit-like mediums in Portugal.
r/ireland was great (as well as the regional subreddits from Ireland). There is an Irish community (!ireland@lemmy.world)on Lemmy that I try to post to but there’s just not that much engagement at the moment, having said that, it has improved.
Someone had a Dallas or Texas group on here (I forget now), but they had such strict posting rules I stopped posting and the thing died pretty quick after.
Our city sub never really had those kinds of issues, drama to be sure from time to time, but for the most part it was just a great place to learn what events were happening that weekend. Or get inside info on something that happened in the news, etc. I have checked in on it a couple times since deleting my Reddit accounts, but it's not the same and feels off since joining lemmy.