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

1.) I believe that the discovery is bad and this is why I'm working on !lemmydirectory@lemmy.dbzer0.com where the goal is to index the communities for people to discover something to follow even if they weren't looking for that specifically. I plan to push a huge update to it somewhere next month.

I think that some community (users, not mods) managed recommendation system where you recommend related communities for you to display on the sidebar would be great too. But that's just an another idea that would never see the light of the day in development. Some communities have sidebars where mods link to related communities but it's really not flexible enough to link communities to each other easily.

2.) Missing enough people is definitely the biggest problem there because even if people knew about the communities someone still needs to populate them and ideally organically instead of it being 1-2 chronic posters.

3.) Revisiting expectations is definitely needed but generalising communities too much is not ideal because if I want to follow one thing but not the other then I would be stuck with lots of content I don't care about. There needs to be some middle ground on that. I have a few imaginary communities on themes I enjoy and mod a few others to help out with moderation. I don't want them to be merged into one blob without a theme going on. This is also why I and the other mod refused to move our communities to !imaginary@reddthat.com which doesn't focus on our preferred niches. But depending on how post tags get implemented in lemmy I would be willing to move to your community. But my requirements would be high like being able to subscribe to only posts from a specific community with specific tags and being able to easily filter posts in community view. Also blacklisting. Basically allowing you to have things in one community but being able to interact with posts as if they were separate ones.

4.) I also think that mod tools and community settings to protect the community and give it direction are severely lacking. For example something like this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5360

5.) Not being able to create your own custom feeds is also a massive problem because you can't split your feed into types like memes/news/discussions/meta etc. Low traffic communities get buried in your feed when you subscribe to them making things bad for the growth. And because everything is mixed together it makes things a bit less pleasant to browse as well. If I could use different feeds for different moods I would definitely interact with lemmy and content I like more because it would be easily available.

And some other issues that I'm not remembering right now.

Apologies for only arriving now. The app I use is pretty hit and miss with sending notifications and mentions are in another tab and rare. I really need to do some more shopping around for apps but I'm in a comfort zone with this one I've been using since before the API debacle on Reddit.

As far as discoverability goes, as a simple user I'm not sure it's so different from Reddit. On Reddit, niche communities coming through /r/all were rare and easy to miss. So the main way of finding these communities was by directly searching for them or coming across mentions of them in comment sections. I'm not expecting to come across a community for some random '90s show in the wild, so that's just something to search up if I think of it (and probably be disappointed because this platform isn't quite there yet).

As for more general communities, they'll have higher activity so will come through whatever feed you're looking at more often. I've found that by the end of the day, I'm just starting to scroll through the things I've seen before, so it's not easy to miss things. Plus users such as yourself do a fantastic service of pointing others in the right direction and making suggestions.

And I think that for now, super specific communities would probably flop. I would love a community for the Harley Quinn show, for example, with memes and discussions throughout the week and between seasons like on Reddit. But there's not enough people yet, so the DC Studios community for anything related to DC Comics adaptations is the way for now. Just as an example. Or to go with your example, a general JRPG community is going to do much better than a Golden Sun specific community.

Certain missing features here versus Reddit definitely play a role too though. If there were multicommunities or some sort of custom feeds for people to add, any niche communities that tried to take off would have a much better chance. Also, I don't see too many OnlyFans workers coming to LemmyNSFW as long as they can't make a post with all of their links to their own profile and pin it, and they can't pick up followers. It can't completely fill the role of a Reddit alternative as long as it only has half the features that Reddit has. At least as far as the end user is concerned.