I made a magazine on kbin as an alternative to a relatively niche subreddit I really appreciated. And in the month since the migration, it’s only grown more apparent that I was a bit over enthusiastic about the scope of that migration. Only 2, maybe 3, others have contributed to the magazine, and it’s usually a question I have no definitive answer for. Oddly enough, there are over 40 silent subscribers, so I’m probably doing something of interest to some people out there.

For better or worse, Kbin still doesn’t have the means to let you remove magazines you’ve created. So rather than deleting or abandoning it, I’ve kind of opted to take responsibility over it and treat it as more of a personal hobby and public repository for myself. Every once in a while I’ll post a tutorial for something I’ve done, or write out some thoughts of my own without any expectation of engagement. When the ability to delete magazines comes through, I might consider migrating my more useful contributions to one of the more centralized magazines at that point and then removing my own.

I agree - there are plenty of empty magazines setup as subreddit clones. What we really need is a push encouraging content and comment submissions more than anything else. That's what's going to drive the development of a vibrant community on kbin.social.

Generally, unless you have at least 20 pieces of content from multiple users with active commentary, most folks will assume it's a dead community and move on to a bigger community on lemmy.world or similar to find more content. One thing I would suggest for the moderators of growing communities is to always comment on, upvote and boost your contributors' submissions in the beginning stages of community growth. Your personal engagement of the content is the first step in encouraging your readers to do the same.

That being said, I'd love for folks to create more new niche communities that didn't exist on Reddit. There's a lot more freedom here - we should take advantage of it.

What beehaw has done with limiting the creation of communities has worked well, since the ones they created have been pretty active.

Not all instances need to be that strict, but might be good to have a place to propose a community, why they'd be a good mod, and type of initial content they plan to post themselves before it grows would help until the user base is bigger to be able to sustain random free for all creation of communities. Some places just exist with nothing posted at all, so you're not sure if even the person who created abandoned it from the get go.

I mean, you're right, but it's pretty inevitable. There will be a natural wave of creations, inactivity and reclaimings that will take place over the coming couple of years.

For now though, this is wild west internet, so trying to control it would be similar to trying to herd cats with firecrackers.

One thing we need to break into a billion tiny dust like pieces is the idea of "Super Moderators" who control hundreds of different boards . This idea lead to the group think that infected Reddit , because when a "Super Moderator" succumbs being prejudiced then it can effect the entire site , either directly on sites the now abusive "Super Moderator" deletes all posts that challenge their prejudices , or indirectly via a chilling effect when the abusive "Super Moderator" bans people from ALL of the subreddits they control, just for interacting with subreddits they disagree with , regardless of the content of those interactions , and with zero hope for appeal since any attempt at communication will be met with silence and a mute.

This uncontrolled rush killed magazines. For example /m/hardware. I wanted to start something, but it was already reserved by someone who never posted anything in a month, not a post, not a comment anywhere. There is no link to other mags on the page, no rules, no nothing.

I messaged the guy to get the magazine back but never got any answer.

I think that's true for some niche topics, but other ones are better served by having dedicated communities from the start.

When I joined I made 2 magazines. One of them was about collecting Nintendo games and I quickly realized that I would have better discussions if I just joined the Nintendo magazine. I've basically abandoned it. The other I made, m/Otomegames I think is needed. We could post in the general gaming magazines, but there's a whole bunch conventions and inside jokes that people who don't play otome games wouldn't understand.

Now for my shameless plug: do you like otome games? Do you not know what otome games are, but romance/adventure games made for women sounds intriguing? Come join us <- direct link. "@Otomegames @kbin.social" <- remove the space for federated peeps

Yeah you're right, there are already a ton of duplicate & niche communities spread across different Lemmy/Kbin instances. It's strange when someone decides to go create yet another niche community in another instance when there's plenty of others on the same topic with barely any activity of their own.

I'm also seeing a lot of accounts creating communities without doing anything else afterwards. Communities won't succeed if the creators/moderators have no interest in posting anything or even updating their own sidebar description.

From a user point of view there's definitely that initial rush of 'wow, this group looks great!' to scanning across to see 0 posts, 0 comments, 0 users access feeling sad...

That's not too say that these should necessarily be removed but it's a lot harder to get people in to niche communities. Unless you outright went into the Reddit equivalent and said politely you were trying to start one here. But they'd probably be happy in Reddit by this stage so...

This makes a lot of sense, imo.

@Brkdncr Beehaw is doing it exactly like that.

You could be right, there's a few here that are still pretty dead, I have tried to inject a bit of life into a few of my favourites but the patients are still unresponsive. That said, its good to have readymade replacements already up and running if/when the clowns running reddit make another catastrophically bad decision that pisses off even more of their userbase.

What does need to happen is a cleaning up of all the duplicates - there are two Swimming comunities and two Idiotsincars for instance. The Android community mods did the right and honourable thing by merging with another Android community on a tech focused instance, others should be encourage to do the same