"You should create a group when demand is there and not the other way around." In other words, start from generalist communities, and create more specialized ones when there is a need. Do you agree?

Absolutely. It's just that redditors are used to the existing order and want to see it replicated in lemmy immediately, jumping over the underlying steps of community growing.

Depends. Communities can create demand. Like !outofcontextcomics@lemmy.world .

It got launched by one poster, took off, and it's awesome. It wouldn't have fit into a more general comics community.

I don't know, this kind of reasoning seems to create too much empty "content" and not enough real communities. Yeah, creating a bunch of generalist coms will get traffic and engagement, but the people there don't actually share anything in common, it's just a time waster.
I don't want Lemmy to be a time wasting app, I want it to have genuine communities with valuable content instead of endless AskReddit, AITA, AIO, etc etc etc. Therefore, I'm of the opinion that people should create communities about their hobbies and create high quality content there, which will drive demand. If the community ends up too specific, they can always just cross post to a more generic one as well.

Depends. There is also value in growing a niche community one post at a time, even if you are the only poster there for weeks or months.

The problem is that trying to talk about very specific things in a general community will just result in silence if no one in the general community knows/cares about the very specific thing.

On Reddit, you can type /r/nameofanygame and find a sub populated by people who also found it that way. This obviously cannot work on Lemmy, not outside of a few very very very popular games. But for games that are too niche to have fandom spaces here, directing the niche fandom elements to !games@sh.itjust.works isn't likely to fit there either. Some of my favorite games are titles that I might just literally be the only person on Lemmy who plays them, so I just don't think there's any kind of space for them, general or specific.

I play a lot of Riichi Mahjong, and I saw that !mahjong@lemmy.nerdcore.social already exists, so when I see some interesting content I try tossing it over there in the hopes that if I keep doing so, maybe at some point more people will eventually join me. Would I be better off posting to !boardgames@sopuli.xyz because generalist good, specific bad? Probably not, I doubt anyone there is interested in deep technical What Would You Discard? analysis. Maybe the most surface level casual/beginner content might fit in, I could crosspost a basic How to Play tutorial there, but content that is too specific doesn't make sense in that kind of community.

For some groups there is no visible demand because they are too niche for general discussions.

In general, yes.

I went and made !otomegames@ani.social instead of glomming into the existing visual novel communities half because someone else had started an otome community that died, so I felt okay making one (and then another when the instance died).

And half because 1) most of general gaming communities does not care about anime romance visual novels aimed at women and I did not really want to see a bunch of name-calling towards us, and 2) although the only currently-active visual novels community would be fine to post to, when I started there were more and the audience was very much dudes who like women. Although there is an overlap between people who play games aimed at horny straight men and people who play otome games (I know some!), it's much smaller, and most otome players I know are women who do not wanna see VNs where we're highly sexualized. I can understand the same for men not wanting to see VNs full of our romantic fantasies (although the dudes in ours are less-often sexualized). I am cool with games aimed at horny men existing, but that does not mean I want to step into a space posting them all the time, the same way I am happy to let other people eat lemons but I'm not putting one in my mouth.

The current !visualnovels@ani.social probably would not reject otome posts, but what it used to be probably would, and the old VN communities probably would too; and most though not all otome players would reject the greater surrounding VN community of the past (what it currently is on ani.social would probably be accepted) because of how often what was posted there would turn out to be galge and not more gender-neutral stuff anyone could like like Ace Attorney.

Finally, the way !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca reacted to a post for a game aimed at women, !infinitynikki@discuss.tchncs.de, with tons of downvotes, was either not very encouraging for anime content that was still gaming content getting put in general communities (especially because one commenter explained they mistook it for a game meant to titillate because the icon was an anime girl even though part of why I really like Infinity Nikki is because it is a nice open-world game where women aren't sexualized, but I can still have nice hair physics and clothing physics), or for content aimed at women getting received well in general spaces.

We're small but I'd rather have this than nothing, or posting in big communities and getting constantly questioned about why I play a game where you can date fictional men instead of putting myself on the market in real life (lots of otome gamers are in happy, healthy relationships in real life! Or are not interested in relationships but still find fictional romance fun, or have trauma and are in a stage in their recovery where fictional romance is okay but looking for dates in real life isn't. In my circumstances, a relationship would be nice but I know I could be happy without one too, and sticking my neck out on some dating app or going to a bar would inevitably get me horrid behavior I have never faced in real life yet. So I'll keep living my daily life, which involves interacting with other humans, sometimes men, but not disrupting it by going to a bar as a non-drinker and non-dancer or downloading a dating app).

This what I think at the moment, even if there might not be that much demand for the community yet:

It is better to try start building it now if you are on smaller instance to fight centralization

I can definitely see the value in this. Just to use !dcstudios@lemmy.world as an example, there's still little enough activity as it is. And if they tried to create separate communities for every series and movie and cartoon like it was on Reddit, instead of just one community with not enough activity, there would be 10+ completely dead communities.

And on that note, I'm still keeping an eye out for this general alternative community that was being floated the other day. Because while it's nice having communities specifically for punk, goth, industrial etc, I think that right now it would be even nicer to have a general purpose alt community where people can discuss anything from music to style to attitude.

You just shouldn't start a community and expect others to post in it a lot 🤷 Most people are lurkers anyways, and the prolific posters are probably already busy with their own communities. So especially in the beginning, it is yours to carry, so chose a topic you are personally interested in and know enough about to regularly post and make good comments. People will come if the community is worth it, the specialisation doesn't matter.

Edit: but you also shouldn't prematurely split off specialized communities like often the case with Discord channels.

I think both ways work. Obviously if there is a demand not being filled, filling it would be good.

But also, sometimes people don't even know they want a thing until they are presented with it. Example: Funhole.

It entirely depends on whether you want to be a shepherd or a... I'm struggling a bit to come up with a metaphore that isn't loaded somehow. Let's go with "blogger".

But if there's a topic you want to discuss, log content for, and write your own articles about, there's little reason to not create your own little space for it all that others can choose to participate in. Such a space can attract new users to the network who aren't currently interested in Linux news and possum pics.

But creating a space that looks like a bunch of link spam with no human engagement can look fake, and dissuade participation, so you need to really put some effort into not looking like a bot.

It's easier to fork an active community. Being a mod is work, but it doesn't require you to write 3000+ words per week to try and catch attention from an unknown population.