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.

  • fxomtEnglish
    33•2 days ago

    Community discovery 100% needs to be improved somehow. No matter how many popular posts you make you will heavily struggle getting the ball rolling, if you ever do.

    This practically guarantees the death of niches, which is [obviously] not good for the fediverse as a whole.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      10•2 days ago

      Don’t people use the Subscribed feed for their niche communities? So once they are subbed, it’s all good?

      If the issue is people not knowing about communities, then those posts on [email protected] should help

      • fxomtEnglish
        14•2 days ago

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule influences this heavily imo

        I think it’s both. On latin for example i have 120 users (35 are lemmy federate bots) but i’m the only one posting there, despite some posts getting a lot of upvotes or comments.

        This can heavily discourage mods and force them to quit which kills the community.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•2 days ago

        My reflex moving over was to subscribe to everything I’m interested in and never use all, because I’ve never used it on reddit.

        This created a problem where since lemmy’s sorting all basically sort by most popular (except scaled but that sort is problematic for other reasons), I basically only saw the meme and news communities I subscribed to on my feed and the niche stuff never made it.

        I know @[email protected] is working on an algorithmic alternative [email protected] but it’s not got support on any apps.

        • Die4EverEnglish
          1•2 days ago

          have you tried Scaled sort? I use Scaled for my subscribed feed and it does a great job showing new posts in niche communities

        • @[email protected]OPEnglish
          1•2 days ago

          Yes, I have several accounts due to that issue. Comes back to the lack of personal feeds mentioned elsewhere.

      • @[email protected]English
        3•2 days ago

        Oh! Today I learned about community promo. Yeah, I guess we could use awareness raising about the existence of that community. Sounds like an awesome resource.

    • @[email protected]English
      4•2 days ago

      Is this a community discovery issue, though? If it’s a popular post in an unpopulated community, people must be seeing it. So, it doesn’t sound like an issue with impressions.

      It’s an issue with conversions. With visibility not translating unto subscriptions. And that’s a totally different problem. If I see a post in Local or in All, and it’s interesting, I’ll upvote it, but that’s not going to get me to subscribe. For that, I need to a) be interested in the community topic according to its name (because I am not clicking into the community), and b) I need to see multiple interesting posts from that community. And if those thresholds are reached, and I subscribe, that doesn’t secure my engagement. Just that you’ll show up in my Subscribed feed.

      All of those are hurdles for a nascent community, and neither are a discoverability issue.

      There could definitely be better ranking options for feeds, but if the posts in question are already “popular”, that doesn’t seem to be the issue.