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.
I really just think the reddit/lemmy structure isn't very suited to small communities.
For small communities we should have a platform structured like a traditional web forum with flat threads and thread bumping. This causes people to get endless streams of discussion even with relatively few users.
Tags would be good. Rather than crossposting, tag your post in up to 5 communities. A photo of a bird might be tagged in Nature Photography, Birds, Animals, and horses.
If a the moderator of c/horses decides the submission is not apropriate, they can un-tag themselves. If all communities un-tag themselves, the submission is 'orphaned' its no longer visible in any C, but still exists in the OPs profile.
The user cannot re-tag c/horses, but can add a new tag if they want. If our man keeps tagging birds as horses, then they might be banned from submitting to the horse tag for a period.
This allows one post to be visible over many communities without crossposting, reposting, or having related overheads of duplication.
If the user does not want to be harrased by ornithologists arguing over whether they think its a western red breasted great titwarbler or a northern red breasted lesser titwarbler, they may also untag their submission from c/birds
Tags on a submission would be visible to users, so if I find this cool titwarbler photo through the nature photography C, but I want to see more titwarblers, I might check out c/birds, or c/horses.
Some of the larger Cs might opt-out of the multiple tag system, allowing submissions only if theirs is the only C tagged.
I really like that idea!
Thread bumping would help a lot actually!
Yes. In my teenage years, these kinds of web forums were the norm, now they are almost as outdated as Usenet or mailing lists. I think that is a shame because I found web forums utterly addictive while on reddit and lemmy I tend to quickly run out of things to read.
"new comments" sort is basically that.