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Treedrake @kbin.social

While larger, more general communities are thriving on the Fediverse - I'm missing out on the niche communities

Gaming, news, tech, general literature. All of these are somewhat thriving, with a steady influx of posts and comments. At the same time, the userbase is sorely lacking for more niche communities. In my case it'd be stuff like poetry, yoga, religion, linguistics, meditation. Or many other communities I'd doubt they'd form a larger userbase here, at least to the degree that it'd foster good discussions. Communities where there are a larger amount of "normal people", that are not tech-aware, and who have no interest in migrating off centralized corporate solutions. That just want a large space to discuss what they're interested in.

This for me at least, makes it hard to completely leave reddit (or even Facebook and their groups!). Do you think the fediverse will ever reach the point where this would become a non-issue?

162 comments

  • The fediverse grows in waves. This was the first wave for the threadiverse, not The Big Wave. Nows the time to let the lead devs catch their breath, prepare for larger userbase and contributor base, and work on critical issues and let contributors start to polish UX issues. The next time there's a wave, this will be a much better place and we'll be ready. That's when you'll start to see a lot more niche communities able to sustain themselves

  • While lots of people are suggesting creating communities for your niche interests, I think it's even more important to to find niche communities that others have created and contribute to them. Obviously you can do both, but if you've got limited time to post it may be better to focus your efforts, and be the "first follower" rather than the leader.

    I've been doing this for /m/Animemes and /m/animeirl, just making one post per day in each. There hasn't been a ton of other activity yet, but the subscriber counts have been growing steadily, so we'll get there.

    I've also been wanting to build up /m/Bitcoin in the same way, but I don't feel like I've got much to contribute right now, so I'm focusing on the anime communities.

    • Yeah, keeping the content flowing will be the most important thing, and it's much less daunting than taking on moderator duties. Everyone on Kbin/Lemmy right now is basically an early adopter, so they might need to take more responsibility to keep momentum up. It's too much to ask people who usually just read news on their niche subreddits to suddenly start up their own community here, but everyone can take one step "up the ladder" so to speak, and we're already seeing this to some extent I think. Lurkers trying their best to be commenters, commenters putting up their own posts and regular posters starting their own communities.

    • My dirty secret? Sometimes I grab college football stories for /m/cfb from… Reddit.

      Sorry everybody.

      • Yeah, most of my stock of saved memes are from r/animemes and r/animeirl. They did at least make it through the filter of being funny enough at the time to compel me to save them. And they're not necessarily ones that would be easily found by looking at the top posts in those subs.

  • I've been pretty disappointed with the DnD community so far. So I've been trying to post a lot about the new playtest material in a magazine I want to grow. So far it's like 5 of posting often but I hope the engagement will bring more

    • I think what you're doing so far is key. And it's really the hard part. The rest is just being a friendly place.

      No one wants to be one of those 5 people howling into the void when something is getting started, but it needs to be done to demonstrate that people are willing to participate. You might also consider posting easy polls or open ended questions to invite engagement. (If you haven't)

      • this is my mindset. its gonna take some of us to kick things off. i do it in my mags where im the main one posting

      • howling into the void

        Yep that's what feels like, and it's part of starting a community because how is anyone going to find you if you're not making any noise?

        It's actually exciting. During my first week around here, someone framed it as the shift from consuming content to making contact and I found that really compelling

        The other thing I'm thinking about is how the other site was like joining a conversation, but here we are starting conversations

    • I just came across https://ttrpg.network/, a Lemmy instance that's specialized toward tabletop roleplaying games. Haven't explored it much but I suspect we'll be seeing this pattern more in the future - whole instances devoted to a particular topic, with the specialized subgenres being communities on there.

      • The more that happens, the more fractured the community becomes, and the easier it will be for a new centralized corporate platform to suck up users. That's how Reddit started in the first place, and how Twitter started. Heck, it's even how LJ started. You look at fractured elements of communities, and build a site for the whole community to come together.

      • That's is where I have been posting mostly. The startrek one has been amazing

  • I think those will come in time. We just need the volume, and also some time to polish (e.g. improvements to the web interface, official apps released for kbin, etc). A lot of tech folks are streaming in but with more polish those who are non-technically inclined will join in as well.

  • there's tons of niche mags around, but when i go to them, no one is participating. we have to help grow them if we want them to thrive. i try to post in them if I see they are empty. we cant expect them to magically appear and grow, we must be proactive

  • For what it's worth, this is exactly how Reddit was in the early days. I remember a niche sub being something that had maybe 30-50 members, now basically every subject has a subreddit with communities in the 5000+ range.

    Just give it time. If there is a particular community you're missing, use this as an opportunity to start it over here and start getting people involved.

  • The instances of the fediverse are necessarily smaller than the reddit server, therefore you will have to search for remote communities on specialized servers. Or start your own.

    If meditation concerns 0.1% of the population, then you will need 10000 accounts for each 10 meditation members, that would be 40 people on kbin. So you have to search on different instances, and maybe move to a different federation. Your main instance should be located where you live and then you search elsewhere for your niche interests.

  • Interested in generative art? (Meaning art created computationally, not really AI art but art created using code)

    If so all are welcome to join our feldgling niche community at kbin.social/m/genart

  • There are some niche communities on fediverse, speaking as primarily a Mastodon.art user. The hashtag system exists as a way of making a toot available for search, as most fediverse platforms don't have full text search. Hashtags essentially work like twitter hashtags but better.

    Fediverse is better suited to niche communities, anyways. Feel free to make your own instance, but remember that running an instance is a huge responsibility: You have to suspend the bad actors, ban people who post hate speech, and generally ensure that your instance is running well. Admin work is psychologically stressful; just ask any of the reddit mods who quit over the API changes making their job impossible.

  • I found one of my fave communities on kbin, and it wasn’t active. So I am posting and checking for new posts every day to help it grow. I understand how you feel, but if you want it to happen you should try to be the change.

  • When I joined Kbin I created the communities I was most active in. Someone created my favorite community just before I did, so I instead requested to be added as a mod and I am now the most active poster there. I am the author of most of the posts there, and the number of subscribers is growing slowly but steadily. I think we just have to do what what's needed to make this the place we want it to be. A lot of us are going to have to go from lurkers to moderators, from occasional users to prolific posters. Things have to start somewhere. If we all just wait until someone else does what we expect, then we're all just stay waiting and nothing is going to happen.

  • It took a long time for niche communities to pop up on Reddit too, remember Reddit has been around a long time now. Back in the day, Digg was the shiznit and nobody knew about Reddit.

  • There is the Fediverse, and there is kbin.social. I'm not even sure how to see what niche communities are out in the Fediverse. You'd have to go through each instance to see what magazines/communities (these are referred to differently in different places) exist out there. Is there a or could there be a directory of sorts to list your magazine/community so that others can find it?

    I feel confident in saying we should not be planning to host every single community on kbin.social.

    • There's a few directory searches I know of.

      One is over on feddit.de. It only searches lemmy instances atm, though, and idk how or how well it's updated as things are made. It seems to go by community name, so for example "drawing" does not return sketching subs and the first result under "art" is Star Trek.

      The other is lemmyverse.net, which seems to parse searches FAR better. With the drawback that neither of those recognizes anything on kbin yet.

      It's helped me here and there and apart from the drawbacks like the first one's behavior, I wonder if my (and @Treedrake 's) trouble is a combination of my own interests being niche and most of the people engaging in those interests being on mastodon instead of here. Fediverse Party and Fedi Directory both tell me there are sizable resources for what I'm looking for, just not through a forum.

      This severely limits lemmy as it can't interface with mastodon tweets/microblogs, and hinders me as well until I have the ability to follow tags and see them in a dedicated feed.

      This is one of those circumstances where forum and blogging culture don't really mesh well. The audience is present but already busy with their own thing, and we're expecting a different form of interaction than they are.

  • I feel like the niche communities will come with time, so I'm not super worried outside of what happens to one specific writing community's audience, which matters a lot if you're a writer trying to build an audience, particularly if you don't want to wait a few years for the community you're been writing a book for to grow again.

    What I'm really missing is the ability to browse /r/all, which will undoubtedly be harder with Lemmy/Kbin. Having something that can aggregate those well is going to be super important for federated communities to snowball together.

162 comments