If you recall reddits growth many of their communities evolved as offshoots of a single generic community. This made it easier for people to see discussions they normally would not get involved in, and once the posts in a similar category reached critical mass it moved to a sub Reddit.
I think people are recreating their niche communities here but they are floundering since the user base is still pretty small. Maybe it’s best to post to the “big” communities until the time is right to move to smaller, targeted communities?
I agree - there are plenty of empty magazines setup as subreddit clones. What we really need is a push encouraging content and comment submissions more than anything else. That’s what’s going to drive the development of a vibrant community on kbin.social.
Generally, unless you have at least 20 pieces of content from multiple users with active commentary, most folks will assume it’s a dead community and move on to a bigger community on lemmy.world or similar to find more content. One thing I would suggest for the moderators of growing communities is to always comment on, upvote and boost your contributors’ submissions in the beginning stages of community growth. Your personal engagement of the content is the first step in encouraging your readers to do the same.
That being said, I’d love for folks to create more new niche communities that didn’t exist on Reddit. There’s a lot more freedom here - we should take advantage of it.
I think that’s true for some niche topics, but other ones are better served by having dedicated communities from the start.
When I joined I made 2 magazines. One of them was about collecting Nintendo games and I quickly realized that I would have better discussions if I just joined the Nintendo magazine. I’ve basically abandoned it. The other I made, m/Otomegames I think is needed. We could post in the general gaming magazines, but there’s a whole bunch conventions and inside jokes that people who don’t play otome games wouldn’t understand.
Now for my shameless plug: do you like otome games? Do you not know what otome games are, but romance/adventure games made for women sounds intriguing? Come join us <- direct link. “@Otomegames @kbin.social” <- remove the space for federated peeps
Oh hi, didn’t expect to see you here!
Have been trying to post content in @Otomegames to make it active. It’s pretty niche though. Thriving and healthy Reddit community whose rules about advertising other communities are making it very hard to move them over here :(
Hi, thank you for your contributions!
I find myself wondering how many people we need to have a self-sustaining community. I’ve been making and stockpiling memes and discussion ideas so I can post regularly, but ideally there’d be enough people so that my posts aren’t the majority.
From a user point of view there’s definitely that initial rush of ‘wow, this group looks great!’ to scanning across to see 0 posts, 0 comments, 0 users access feeling sad…
That’s not too say that these should necessarily be removed but it’s a lot harder to get people in to niche communities. Unless you outright went into the Reddit equivalent and said politely you were trying to start one here. But they’d probably be happy in Reddit by this stage so…
This might actually be a good time to invite people from Reddit, while the new unpopular decisions are still fresh in people’s minds…
I did this while the whole API thing was happening and only a couple people liked and joined, and one user said “what’s going on with Reddit?”
Tough crowd, I guess. :-(. But you did have a couple people join, which is a couple people more than would have joined before. That’s not zero.
We’re all used to these massive platforms with 9-digit numbers of users, but there’s no need to be that big for everyone to have a good experience. I doubt anyone on Reddit regularly interacted with more than a tiny fraction of the total userbase, even if they hung out in the big subs.
Yeah, but the sub I made a replacement for was small and specialized, but the super low numbers here don’t really facilitate a good community because most of the content was people telling their stories. I’m not running back to Reddit by any means, but I do miss that community (r/Narcolepsy if anyone’s curious).
That’s definitely a case where absolute numbers matter, yeah. I miss the shared-experience subs most, too, though there’s a surprising amount of stuff here already. You might try posting about narcolepsy in some of the broader health [or whatever category you’d put it in] communities, and see who’s there. That’s the kind of thing people might not expect to find at all at this point.
But I think a lot of people are talking about hobby communities, which can be made active by either a large number of people who post rarely, or a smaller number who post frequently, without having to change the overall content very much (I think a lot of people who share any projects could share more projects than they do). The number of people required for “critical mass “ in a forum is a lot lower than people think, and also, a lot more affected by who the people are, and the climate of the community. It’s something I (and I’m sure many others) remember from before massive platforms existed, but apparently it is not obvious to people who didn’t see it. Different experiences, different internet, but I think the essential desire for community is the same, and small communities can flourish in the same way.
I mean, you’re right, but it’s pretty inevitable. There will be a natural wave of creations, inactivity and reclaimings that will take place over the coming couple of years.
For now though, this is wild west internet, so trying to control it would be similar to trying to herd cats with firecrackers.
That statement about herding cats will stay with me for a bit.
/Lights a cracker
