there’s no communities for my niche interests!!!

more like “i want a ready-made community where other people already putting effort into posting cool and intersting stuff, and all I want to do is sit on my ass and shower posts generously with “”“muh upvotes™””“”

  • AFK BRB Chocolate
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    695 hours ago

    This is kind of bullshit. On a big platform, like Reddit, where there are orders of magnitude more users, the likelihood is that there are a good number of people interested in whatever niche topic you want. That’s a draw for a lot of people. I left Reddit for Lemmy for good, but we’re just not up to that kind of user base.

    And it’s not zero effort to get a community going and keep it active, especially with a small user base. It’s perfectly reasonable for someone to want a place that discusses their niche interest without wanting to be responsible for running that place. It doesn’t make them bad or lazy.

    • @Maggoty
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      1 hour ago

      You could always go one level up. Like instead of a crochet community and a knitting community you could have a yarn community that incorporates all types of weaving with yarn.

      • AFK BRB Chocolate
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        354 minutes ago

        For sure, though that really doesn’t solve the problem. If I’m really into sports-themed shot glasses, making a post in a community for drinking ware, or for sports merchandise, isn’t going to mean I get more content about sports shot glasses, and it doesn’t increase the number of people on the site who have something to say about them. On a platform with millions of users, there might be enough other people with the same interest to generate a critical mass of content.

        • @Maggoty
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          351 minutes ago

          Yeah but everyone seems to be expecting Lemmy to just turn into the high point of Reddit. Reddit wasn’t built in a day and neither will Lemmy be built in a day.

          • AFK BRB Chocolate
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            246 minutes ago

            Completely agree. I personally I’m fine with the trade-off I made. There’s even some benefits to a smaller site. I remember on Reddit there were lots of times I didn’t make a comment, even when I had something to say, because there were already literally thousands of comments, some with thousands of upvotes, and I figured anything I said would be lost in the din. Here, if you’ve got something to say, it’s very likely to be seen.

        • @Maggoty
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          150 minutes ago

          I think you clicked the wrong comment to reply to.

    • @[email protected]
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      43 hours ago

      I look at the nfl community here. It really only gets a handful of posts on Sunday and that’s it. It blows my mind that there isn’t more engagement

      • AFK BRB Chocolate
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        145 minutes ago

        I wonder if that’s related to a user base that skews heavily toward techies.

        • @[email protected]
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          213 minutes ago

          Im sure youre right. My point is thats not even a niche topic. A quick Google estimates there are 21 million viewers PER GAME every week. There are literally hundreds of millions of fans of the nfl, but even a subject so popular can’t maintain a healthy community on lemmy, how are these niche topics supposed to stand a chance at survival?

    • @Jesus_666
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      114 hours ago

      Especially if you didn’t have a lot of spare time. With an active community you can just dip into discussions when you have the time. With a community you’re trying to establish yourself you absolutely have to provide a steady stream of content until it (hopefully) takes off.

      • AFK BRB Chocolate
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        159 minutes ago

        Right, exactly. And let’s not forget that a healthy percentage of all online communities is made of lurkers who don’t really want to post at all, but they enjoy reading stuff they’re interested in.