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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.

83 comments

  • For !jrpg@lemmy.zip, it's a big enough category that it should be more active than it is. The corresponding subreddits for JRPGs and retro gaming aren't super far apart at 255k and 404k subscribers respectively, but !retrogaming@lemmy.world is more active by orders of magnitude here on Lemmy.

    I've started to focus more on discussion prompts in the community as news isn't enough; the JRPG community has been an excellent news aggregator for over a year now (although it's a slow news time for the genre currently). I'd love to hear from other niche communities about what's worked and what hasn't to drive engagement.

    • I’d love to hear from other niche communities about what’s worked and what hasn’t to drive engagement.

      There are a few other threads in this community on how to drive engagement. Feel free to open another one if you feel like it!

    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.

  • I think part of it is that searching isn't intuitive. Some of the apps make it easier, but some are bad at it. The web interface for a newcomer isn't set up where you can just scan the page and see a friendly spot to go at it. You have to look for it. It isn't hard to find, and anyone familiar with the internet should know where to look, but it is a barrier.

    I say that because I've had people irl complain about it when trying to use lemmy for the first time.

    • I just checked, LW still has this on their banner:

      Not ideal, but probably something other instances could maybe emulate

      • Maybe it would also be helpful to have a "welcome message" that a new user of a lemmy instance receives as a notification after registration. This message could include information about community discovery, information about different instances, frontends, and so on. (Each instance should be able to have their own "welcome message", of course.)

      • That is a great idea! I never use a browser for lemmy after signup so I've never seen it bait before

  • @fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com @Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com and @Zero22xx@lemmy.blahaj.zone, curious to hear your thoughts about it.

    • 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.

      • 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.

        Summit can do this https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.idunnololz.summit&hl=en_US

        They call it a "multi-community"

        Low traffic communities get buried in your feed when you subscribe to them

        I use Subscribed+Scaled sort to fix this issue, it's my default sort method

      • 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.

        This is a big one for me - on R, one can create a "multireddit" (collection view of multiple subreddits in one combined feed) without subscribing to any of the communities; for example I have one called "news" that's 10+ news subreddits which I do not subscribe to; subscriptions are for my actual real direct interests only. Subscribing to news specific communities can quickly overrun and bury your Subscribed feed.

        Lemmy as a software platform is missing the entire concept of a multireddit and detracts from it's usefulness for certain types of users such as myself; I still get most of my daily news from R and sadly gaming communities did not migrate en masse to lemmyverse so they're all still on R.

      • Very complete comment, thanks.

    • 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.

  • On our new user application, we have a question for 'What communities you would most like to participate in.'

    When I read through those applications, a lot of the time I remember communities that would fit what they're looking for. While we could send them some links in an introductory message, it would be better to crowdsource that information.

    If we can encourage people to ask about communities, that might help? I could do more of that myself, since I don't think I've ever asked before.

    !communitypromo@lemmy.ca allows request posts, and if the volume gets to high we can redirect people to !lemmy411@lemmy.ca (or equivalent communities) so users can stay subscribed to CommunityPromo without seeing question spam in their feeds

    • If we can encourage people to ask about communities, that might help? I could do more of that myself, since I don’t think I’ve ever asked before.

      We can probably try that on !communitypromo@lemmy.ca.

      Nice idea to have custom welcome messages

  • Discovery still needs to be improved. And we need more active members, that would be delusional to say otherwise.

    But I also think a unified linking mechanism between instances, communities, threads and to a specific message in any thread no matter the instance the reader is clicking the link from would help encourage people to link a lot more. I don't link as much as I would like to mostly because of that reason. And more links would also help discoverability of interesting content.

    • You can use https://lemmyverse.link/

      A bit hacky, but still works

      • Yes, I know it exists (thx to you, btw ;) but it's still a hack and it's far from being intuitive. Too many options are offered to anyone that just clicked a link and is now facing options and some odd delay before the link works. It's good to have it, but it should not be needed at all to begin with ;)

  • I had a quick look, and most of those seem to be niches that can’t be filled until we reach a higher population.

    100% agree. And I know it first hand with !journaling@sh.itjust.works: it could be much larger as one just easily see when comparing with the similar reddit sub, but we don't share the same user base to begin with ;)

    As it is I don't think we need more communities. We need more active members and simpler way to promote specific content. Like I said in my other answer, for me the real issue is there: for something that is proud to be 'federated', linking anywhere from anywhere should be rock solid and dead simple. It is not, far from it. If it's even doable. Heck, even within my own community: I don't know how I can safely put links to any previous thread or message in a thread that I'm sure will work for anyone clicking them no matter the instance they're logged in.

    Maybe I'm missing something obvious and it's already a thing? But I think getting that ability to link stuff would be a huge win for Lemmy, no mater the number of active members ;)

    • As said in the other comment, you can use https://lemmyverse.link/

      A bit hacky, but still works

      • Yep, and like I said it's good it exists but it should not be needed ta all, it's way too hacky. I really think the ability to link between components (no matter where and what they are) in what presents itself as a fediverse should edit: ought to work without hack.

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