I find half the battle here is finding new places to sub to. I’ll browse all but always forget to sub to new ones I see.
I think for sports, it’s difficult as it seems most of us early adopters here are, well let’s say nerdier than the average, and as a rule tend to follow sport less.
Even me, I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch sport, aside from the olympics. But as an introvert that had a shitty home life I learnt quickly how to be a fake extrovert and thus had a lot of friends and so got surrounded by sport and stuff.
I find half the battle here is finding new places to sub to.
At the moment, none of Lemmy – and AFAIK, kbin/mbin/etc – or any of the clients provide a native way to search all of the Threadiverse. Some of that is kind of intrinsic to the distributed design, intended to help it scale, let instances be small if required. An instance doesn’t track all the activity on all the instances out there.
However, if you go to lemmyverse.net, they have a list of all of the communities across all of the instances on the Threadiverse. You can search and filter by various criteria.
That only shows you the communities that your particular instance knows about. But it’s not even all communities over all federated instances.
An instance only “knows” about a community on another instance once both (a) it has federated with the other instance and (b) someone has explicitly triggered a search for “!communityname@remoteinstancename” on an instance. Like, that community doesn’t get added to the list of known communities on federated instances just because someone has created it.
For example, take bbs.9tail.net, a small lemmy instance.
You can see that that it’s federated with lemmy.world on its instances page:
And it’s only blocked a single instance, lemmygrad.ml.
But (as of this writing, and that could change if someone goes and starts triggering searches for stuff on there), it only has two pages of communities, with 63 (in a quick count) known. There are far more than 63 communities on lemmy.world alone, not to mention on all the other instances that bbs.9tail.net is federated with.
Lemmyverse.net, on the other hand, crawls all the instances it can find and builds a full index. Currently has over 27,000 communities. Once you get a “!community@instance” name from there, you can trigger a search for it on your home instance, and your home instance will learn about it. But until you or someone else does that, your home instance won’t know about that community.
Because almost all niche topic communities that i am interested in have very few people posting. The niche topics were also what made reddit interesting to me, i hardly ever browsed all there.
Why?
I kinda like how I often quickly run out of new interesting posts to comment on, but there is enough that I can have engaging conversations.
The more people that come the more it gets watered down. Not that I am gatekeeping, people can do as they like. Just I am happy right now.
Edit: Curious about the downvotes. Considering I explicitly said I’m not trying to gate keep and people can do as they please.
I wouldn’t find twice the number of people, so that a few niche communities get more activity.
[email protected] for instance is pretty quiet with how popular the sport is.
Also a few “real life” communities like [email protected] and [email protected] would benefit from more activity
I just subbed to all three of those.
I find half the battle here is finding new places to sub to. I’ll browse all but always forget to sub to new ones I see.
I think for sports, it’s difficult as it seems most of us early adopters here are, well let’s say nerdier than the average, and as a rule tend to follow sport less.
Even me, I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch sport, aside from the olympics. But as an introvert that had a shitty home life I learnt quickly how to be a fake extrovert and thus had a lot of friends and so got surrounded by sport and stuff.
[email protected] and [email protected] might be useful to you
At the moment, none of Lemmy – and AFAIK, kbin/mbin/etc – or any of the clients provide a native way to search all of the Threadiverse. Some of that is kind of intrinsic to the distributed design, intended to help it scale, let instances be small if required. An instance doesn’t track all the activity on all the instances out there.
However, if you go to lemmyverse.net, they have a list of all of the communities across all of the instances on the Threadiverse. You can search and filter by various criteria.
https://lemmyverse.net/communities
I really think that that should be the starting point for most users.
You can search for communities across all federated instances by clicking on “All” in the communities page: https://lemmy.ml/communities?listingType=All
That only shows you the communities that your particular instance knows about. But it’s not even all communities over all federated instances.
An instance only “knows” about a community on another instance once both (a) it has federated with the other instance and (b) someone has explicitly triggered a search for “!communityname@remoteinstancename” on an instance. Like, that community doesn’t get added to the list of known communities on federated instances just because someone has created it.
For example, take bbs.9tail.net, a small lemmy instance.
You can see that that it’s federated with lemmy.world on its instances page:
https://bbs.9tail.net/instances
And it’s only blocked a single instance, lemmygrad.ml.
But (as of this writing, and that could change if someone goes and starts triggering searches for stuff on there), it only has two pages of communities, with 63 (in a quick count) known. There are far more than 63 communities on lemmy.world alone, not to mention on all the other instances that bbs.9tail.net is federated with.
Lemmyverse.net, on the other hand, crawls all the instances it can find and builds a full index. Currently has over 27,000 communities. Once you get a “!community@instance” name from there, you can trigger a search for it on your home instance, and your home instance will learn about it. But until you or someone else does that, your home instance won’t know about that community.
indeed.
Because almost all niche topic communities that i am interested in have very few people posting. The niche topics were also what made reddit interesting to me, i hardly ever browsed all there.
The hardware communities are not active enough. We need more people who are interested in niche topics
Find a smaller instance with similar interests or views, and scroll by local!