Kind of a companion thread to the recent one on [email protected] asking people which community there were missing.
I had a quick look, and most of those seem to be niches that can’t be filled until we reach a higher population.
There is still maybe some potential improvement about some less well-known community that other people are interested in and that could some additional activity.
I try to help to make less known communities known with the regular threads on [email protected] (now moving to [email protected] ), but there is probably only a level of detail we have to stop at with 47k monthly active users.
One example is [email protected], it seems reasonable active, and is probably a better compromise than having each game having its own community.
Similar with [email protected], or [email protected]. I posted a thread about Ted Lasso a few days ago, it got some nice comments, but probably not enough to have a full fledged dedicated community.
@[email protected] @[email protected] and @[email protected], curious to hear your thoughts about it.
1.) I believe that the discovery is bad and this is why I’m working on [email protected] where the goal is to index the communities for people to discover something to follow even if they weren’t looking for that specifically. I plan to push a huge update to it somewhere next month.
I think that some community (users, not mods) managed recommendation system where you recommend related communities for you to display on the sidebar would be great too. But that’s just an another idea that would never see the light of the day in development. Some communities have sidebars where mods link to related communities but it’s really not flexible enough to link communities to each other easily.
2.) Missing enough people is definitely the biggest problem there because even if people knew about the communities someone still needs to populate them and ideally organically instead of it being 1-2 chronic posters.
3.) Revisiting expectations is definitely needed but generalising communities too much is not ideal because if I want to follow one thing but not the other then I would be stuck with lots of content I don’t care about. There needs to be some middle ground on that. I have a few imaginary communities on themes I enjoy and mod a few others to help out with moderation. I don’t want them to be merged into one blob without a theme going on. This is also why I and the other mod refused to move our communities to [email protected] which doesn’t focus on our preferred niches. But depending on how post tags get implemented in lemmy I would be willing to move to your community. But my requirements would be high like being able to subscribe to only posts from a specific community with specific tags and being able to easily filter posts in community view. Also blacklisting. Basically allowing you to have things in one community but being able to interact with posts as if they were separate ones.
4.) I also think that mod tools and community settings to protect the community and give it direction are severely lacking. For example something like this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5360
5.) Not being able to create your own custom feeds is also a massive problem because you can’t split your feed into types like memes/news/discussions/meta etc. Low traffic communities get buried in your feed when you subscribe to them making things bad for the growth. And because everything is mixed together it makes things a bit less pleasant to browse as well. If I could use different feeds for different moods I would definitely interact with lemmy and content I like more because it would be easily available.
And some other issues that I’m not remembering right now.
Summit can do this https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.idunnololz.summit&hl=en_US
They call it a “multi-community”
I use Subscribed+Scaled sort to fix this issue, it’s my default sort method
Makes me sad that it’s not open source but I will try it in a moment. The link you gave me doesn’t provide a download so I’m grabbing the app from github.
This is a big one for me - on R, one can create a “multireddit” (collection view of multiple subreddits in one combined feed) without subscribing to any of the communities; for example I have one called “news” that’s 10+ news subreddits which I do not subscribe to; subscriptions are for my actual real direct interests only. Subscribing to news specific communities can quickly overrun and bury your Subscribed feed.
Lemmy as a software platform is missing the entire concept of a multireddit and detracts from it’s usefulness for certain types of users such as myself; I still get most of my daily news from R and sadly gaming communities did not migrate en masse to lemmyverse so they’re all still on R.
Working on it
👀
Summit can do this https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.idunnololz.summit&hl=en_US
They call it a “multi-community”
There are some genre communities here at least. The incremental community is just broken, but I can get into the Cinny Matrix chatroom just fine: https://incremental.social/.
[email protected] is active, I run [email protected], there were more that I followed and lost the list of when I lost access to my incremental.social account besides the Matrix stuff. But communities for specific games probably will be hard to find.
Does not help the Reddit otomegames sub shoves other community promo to a Self-Promotion Sunday nobody checks. I get it, constant spam is not fun, but it also sucks for visibility, especially since I asked them if they’d be willing to get off Reddit and move to Fedi and they said no.
Same feeling on another community I’m trying to promote Lemmy on. It’s usually me and someone else on that Sunday thread that nobody reads.
The feature has been announced to have been funded a while ago, not sure when it will arrive, but I personally also think that this is going to be a game changer.
But to be honest, none of the other platforms (Piefed or Mbin) offer it either.
Very complete comment, thanks.
Apologies for only arriving now. The app I use is pretty hit and miss with sending notifications and mentions are in another tab and rare. I really need to do some more shopping around for apps but I’m in a comfort zone with this one I’ve been using since before the API debacle on Reddit.
As far as discoverability goes, as a simple user I’m not sure it’s so different from Reddit. On Reddit, niche communities coming through /r/all were rare and easy to miss. So the main way of finding these communities was by directly searching for them or coming across mentions of them in comment sections. I’m not expecting to come across a community for some random '90s show in the wild, so that’s just something to search up if I think of it (and probably be disappointed because this platform isn’t quite there yet).
As for more general communities, they’ll have higher activity so will come through whatever feed you’re looking at more often. I’ve found that by the end of the day, I’m just starting to scroll through the things I’ve seen before, so it’s not easy to miss things. Plus users such as yourself do a fantastic service of pointing others in the right direction and making suggestions.
And I think that for now, super specific communities would probably flop. I would love a community for the Harley Quinn show, for example, with memes and discussions throughout the week and between seasons like on Reddit. But there’s not enough people yet, so the DC Studios community for anything related to DC Comics adaptations is the way for now. Just as an example. Or to go with your example, a general JRPG community is going to do much better than a Golden Sun specific community.
Certain missing features here versus Reddit definitely play a role too though. If there were multicommunities or some sort of custom feeds for people to add, any niche communities that tried to take off would have a much better chance. Also, I don’t see too many OnlyFans workers coming to LemmyNSFW as long as they can’t make a post with all of their links to their own profile and pin it, and they can’t pick up followers. It can’t completely fill the role of a Reddit alternative as long as it only has half the features that Reddit has. At least as far as the end user is concerned.
Thank you for your comment!