Gradually we’ve been seeing the tv and movies or shows and movies communities pick up activity, which is good, and the multiple games communities each seem to be doing okay too.
Entertainment
However, there remains kind of an awkward spot where there’s not exactly a general entertainment community (outside of Beehaw, that is) from what I can tell. There is an existing community, [email protected], though that someone could try to pick up and make active.
This could serve as a catchall for some of the more business-oriented news and some of the fluff celebrity chatter, depending on how one wants to go with it. Worth noting for celebrity chatter there is also [email protected] though.
Music
In a similar vein, while there’s a variety of music communities, there’s only a few generic ones, with the largest outside of Beehaw and Hexbear being the largely undefined Music community on Lemmy World. The lack of definition, that is, no sidebar guidance on what the community may be used for, makes it unclear what the community’s expectations/preferences for posts are.
As with entertainment, this could be where more music business news could find its home, alongside some band chatter. Although as with entertainment, there’s a music-themed community for the chatter to be found at [email protected] for those interested.
Sports
Likewise with sports, there’s a ton of different sports communities, but only two large generic communities to be found on Beehaw and Hexbear (supposing Lemmyverse is accurate). Before any of the more specific sports communities can gain more activity, I think it’d help to have a generic sports community to help people get oriented and find likeminded folks to form whatever specific communities they’d like.
Much like the first two, this could be for sports news and chatter…But unlike the first two, I can’t find any generic fluff sports star/team chat communities.
Ideas on How and Where to Organize
In each of these cases regarding broader communities, I think following a similar organizational approach to Beehaw could be a good idea, but they would be better suited to instances more openly federated and not at as much risk of defederation. A few Lemmy instances that come to mind for this are Lemmee, ShitJustWorks, Lemmy Zip, and perhaps Reddthat?
I’m not sure where Mbin instances are in terms of federation smoothness and stability, otherwise I might suggest some of them. On a different note, if there were more Piefed instances I might suggest them, but last I checked the flagship seems to still be the largest and isn’t open for community creation.
In short: there’s good opportunities for broad, generic topic communities for entertainment, music, and sports on more widely federated instances. At the same time, even where these communities may exist on some widely federated instances, opportunity remains for more clearly defined variations of these communities to encourage posting with less uncertainty.
As if the lack of infrastructure was the reason we don’t have more users.
It certainly is one of the factors.
We missed a lot of opportunities during Rexxit because Redditors did not know where to go and could not easily find the communities they were interested on, except for the very popular ones.
Then we had the period where people were saying “oh, just send everyone to LW”, which did not really help in terms of discovery and basically painted a target on their backs, not to mention that it caused such a problematic dynamic in the federation: given it is the instance with the most people and the most communities, it generates a lot of activities and makes it almost impossible for instances that are away from Europe to keep up.
So, the Lemmy network is a bit capped at the current size. It will only be able to grow 2x if the majority of users end up on LW, and the more users on LW, the bigger the problem gets.
Having instances focused exclusively on being the home of communities would remove the bottleneck and reduce the load on any single instance. It would remove the “which instance to join” problem and it would bring a more clear migration path.