Like others, I came over when Reddit was banning 3rd party apps. Many communities were being started and I wanted to help. So I chose one community to form here and try and grow. And we did! There was a time a short while in the little KC Chiefs community was in the top 100 communities on Lemmy world. I knew that wouldn’t last that we would be outpaced by many more broad appeal communities but I didn’t predict the reverse in engagement growth that has come. Stagnation sure, I didn’t think Lemmy was going to surpass reddit for a long while yet, but not the barren communities of today. Meme communities and the “small gripe” adjacent communities are doing fine, but it seems all others have shrunk. I tried to keep the Kerbal Space Program community active for a bit but had to return to the official forums and even subreddit for discussion. The post I made in the Go community here remains the only post in the community.
A platform led by a CEO who edits comments of users, lies about other professionals and then double downs on the lie when proven to be a liar can’t be trusted. And in general I prefer the decentralized open source backbone of Lemmy to the ad ridden, rage bait and bug filled Reddit. I’d love for this to be my full time home for discussing my niche interests but that’s not possible without others engaging with the content.
I posted a lot in the beginning, tried to comment a lot too but now it feels like talking to myself when I make a new post in the community I started and get few or no responses. What can be done? Community specific advice is nice, but I’m looking more for Lemmy World level solutions as I’m sure there’s many many other niche communities I’m not apart of experiencing the same thing.
First and foremost, let’s get this out of the way…
Fuck the Chiefs.
Now that we’ve cleared up that order of business, yes, it is disappointing that there aren’t many niche communities. I still have to go to /r/raiders because there is little to no activity on the Raiders instances I found. Granted, I’ll admit, I’m kinda part of the problem bc when I looked them up, I just saw the posts were outdated and old, and never bothered engaging, or trying to make those communities happen. I remember they blacked out our sub for a day or week or whatever, and nothing really came of it. Engagement seems the same. I’m guessing sports communities as a whole don’t really care about the bs reddit pulled w 3rd party apps, and probably were less likely to have been using a 3rd party app or cared. I remember seeing comments along the lines of “good, glad the sub’s back. What were y’all even trying to accomplish with your little protest anyways?” I wish people did care because I have to use the shitty mobile site for reddit bc I’m for sure not installing their dumpster fire app.
I think you make a good point about whether the reddit bs is the kind of thing that certain communities would likely find offensive.
Obviously subs about data privacy would be more offended than a Raiders community.