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Is communities discovery really that bad, do we just miss enough people, or should people revisit their expectations and go for more general communities?

Kind of a companion thread to the recent one on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com 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 !newcommunities@lemmy.world (now moving to !communitypromo@lemmy.ca ), but there is probably only a level of detail we have to stop at with 47k monthly active users.

One example is !jrpg@lemmy.zip, it seems reasonable active, and is probably a better compromise than having each game having its own community.

Similar with !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works, or !showsandmovies@lemm.ee. 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.

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83 comments
    1. Just like default theming, I think it suffers from a problem of "it works for me the developer so who cares." Community discovery could be so much better. As far as I know, PieFed is the only project that's actually looking at it from first principles instead of "here's a totally useless "trending" box, we good right?"
    2. To me, the root cause analysis is that the nature of Lemmy's design makes it tough to customize. You can't have a custom sort order. You can't (easily) have an admin change what the "trending" box is based on, or whether it exists at all. I think it leaves things in a weird state where a handful of Lemmy developers have to do everything, instead of needing to focus on a core set of robust functionality and letting a little ecosystem develop of customizations and tweaks with a tight feedback loop between developers, admins, and users.
    3. It honestly could be as simple as a box that assembles the last five posts from !newcommunities@lemmy.world or !communities@ponder.cat. Do something. I think it would honestly be super motivating if someone posted to !newcommunities and then saw their community start to show up in the box. You'd need to moderate some spam of course.
    4. I actually don't think the "please federate my community everywhere" tools are as necessary as they seem like they would be. I've always seen from even a single post to one of the promo communities, it seems like the community pretty much goes everywhere.
    5. I think a lot of the "niche communities go quiet" problem could be solved with better interoperation with Mastodon. It's fine if only 3 people on Lemmy talk about JRPGs, if they can talk to a whole community external to Lemmy about it, on Lemmy. That was the whole point of ActivityPub, but unfortunately ActivityPub isn't all that well-designed, so it's a lot harder to make happen than it should be.

    Those are my thoughts, in no particular order.

    • I just added a "new communities" block to the sidebar on https://piefed.social/

      Thanks for the idea! It seems so obvious in retrospect.

    • Good thoughts, thanks!

      The small box with the last 5 posts from a community promoting community is a neat idea.

      (Just FYI, I am personally going to mostly use !communitypromo@lemmy.ca from now on. )

      Seems like again, we are waiting for our Savior Piefed

      • I just looked into adding a box with the last 5 posts. The problem there is the titles can be written any old how so it looks really messy. Also the links in the box would go to the post, not straight to the new community.

        So I just made a box that gets the 5 most recently added communities. It's on the home page in the top right, have a look.

83 comments