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.
Niche communities either need to cohere on their own, or live on a site that's large enough to sustain them. Spreading activity over too many communities/mags/subs/channels/whatever will make things seem even less active, and will make participation less appealing. People will always drop out, and if people don't "drop in" through search or discovery, activity obviously can only go down.
Meanwhile the fediverse has other issues - it is inherently "techy" and most major selling points are things "casuals" just don't give a shit about. Also, some of them just aren't true - it really sucks if you traipse up here with the expectation of less "site politics" and admin fuckery, and then run into you-know-which instances, instances being run maliciously, weird federation/defederation antics etc.
The fediverse as a concept and the lemmy.world-aligned part of it both have serious issues that could make activity hard to increase by putting off both existing and prospective users.
Yeah, the amount of Tankies here is JARRING. Up until this point I had been someone who fell in the "Communism is a nice ideal, but in the real world its never panned out and may be likely to always pan out the way it has done so so far when tried", and it took like a WEEK on Lemmy to go from that to "No fucking WONDER communism has always ended up the way it has"
It absolutely is, although I'm not even talking about communism specifically. I'm basically a socdem and a leftist (as far as actual, normal society goes - less so for Lemmy, obviously), though that's completely irrelevant. It's all about... just shitty behavior, false flagging, wannabe-authoritarian, bad-faith, trolling, dishonest bullshit. Question communities like this and asklemmy are chock-full of thinly veiled soapboxing and questions loaded more heavily than a thousand cargo ships. Even if you agree with the basic points, it's fucking obnoxious. Not only that, it's bloody stupid and a prime example of shooting oneself in the foot, at least if the idea was ever that more than about forty people would use this thing.
Reddit was full of subs where the (often right-wing or particularly right-wing tolerant but not exclusively) twats-in-charge banned you from subs or the site at the drop of a hat. This was a major selling point for the fediverse - why if that happens on the fediverse, it's Decentralized so you'd just blahdiblahdiblah. In reality, though, several communities - the only active ones in many cases - are apparently sticking around on instances where the only difference from r/conservative or whatever is the paintjob on aforementioned twat-in-charge and their views. If they're not condoning "power" abuse, trolling and spam from even more blatantly bad-faith instances, they certainly aren't doing anything to mitigate it. That doesn't really look dramatically better as far as fairness and tolerance go.
I was wanting to respond to this, but tbh, you said everything pretty well yourself and I dont really have anything further to contribute other than I agree with a lot of your points here