1y ago

Is there any way to reverse degrowth of the niche communities on Lemmy?

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.

79 comments

IMO, where lemmy is right now. Niche communities are counter productive. Especially as there is often 3 times the same niche communities on 3 different instances.
Try to talk about your niche content in a larger community. Talk about Oshi no ko in a generic manga/anime community. Try to talk about Kult RPG in a generic rpg community. Talk about french politics in a general France/Europe community.
Today we have generic community with like 10 posts a day and under them a bunch of niches with a post per week. Uf you move these posts to the general community above you now get 15 posts a day.
Content is what drags users, not yet another niche community.
Lemmy is still on the verge of usability, there is few very engaged user who make a large fraction of the content. Keeping it alive, but if in 6 month they have less time some /c will deperish
- Unfortunately some niches don’t fit with other, larger communities. Simracing, for example, makes no sense in gaming communities, but also makes no sense in car communities.
  I’m spending more and more time back on Reddit because that’s where the community is. Otherwise it’s just empty with the occasional post here.
  
  Unfortunately some niches don’t fit with other, larger communities. Simracing, for example, makes no sense in gaming communities, but also makes no sense in car communities.
  Do you also enjoy other non-sim racing games? You might post about some of those and then if the opportunity rises also bring up the other simracing games you're into and direct some folks to a simracing community that way.
  It's roundabout, but I think that's often how one makes paths to more niche subjects.
- Especially as there is often 3 times the same niche communities on 3 different instances.
  This is why I haven't tried to do anything with !fire@lemmy.world even though I asked to take it over. !fire@lemmy.ml had already gotten going a little bit, so I'd rather direct folks there.
- Oshi no Ko is not niche lol
- Content is what drags users, not yet another niche community.
  Absolutely not, I had to make a post last week to find something that's niche in reddit and not on lemmy because it had a sub and lemmy didn't have a community on it. I always make posts on any niche community if I have to. I don't mind whether it's dead or not. I am sure many people feel that way too.
- Well, but that basically means I'd have to rely on different platforms if I want to post and discuss, say, niche music that'd just be buried immediately in the usual "popular" music communities (that often have a slightly rockist slant).
  Even on reddit, the ambient music or IDM communities are fairly small.
  
  If the community is so large that your post is immediately buried, it’s large enough for a subcommunity.
  However, most communities on the threadiverse are not that large. In that case, fragmenting the tiny communities even more just hides your post from the users who might be interested but are not subscribed to a niche subcommunity of a small community.

Continue to spread Lemmy on other sites. Post Lemmy memes on Reddit, Instagram, etc. and be sure to include the original Lemmy link.
- I appreciate all you admins here, I really do. Far more transparent than from Reddit and you do it all without making profit.
  The pinned post to Lemmy World sounded like (to me) that you recognize a lot of people signed up, made communities, and then have abandoned Lemmy leaving a lot of ghost communities that you all want to clean up. Totally understandable, especially with all the legal considerations about leaving online spaces unmoderated.
  It just got me thinking about how Lemmy has changed, and how I really want it to succeed. I can try and follow this suggestion, but I almost feel like for a lot of the more niche interests, Lemmy will sort of just be in a holding mode until Reddit inevitably fumbles the ball again leading to a new migration, this time with a more clear destination.

Here's some things Lemmy could potentially implement:
a default sort that favors smaller communities
better onboarding for new users that guides them into discovering new communities
giving recommendations to other similar communities
- The sorting algorithm changes are what I've been waiting for forever. A bit disappointed it's taking so long. I basically never see many communities I'm subbed to. I miss having a local city community. It has me constantly thinking of just dealing with Reddit's bullshit, cause if it's not big news or memes, Lemmy ain't cutting it.
  
  The sorting algorithm changes are what I’ve been waiting for forever. A bit disappointed it’s taking so long. I basically never see many communities I’m subbed to.
  On that last point, are those communities fairly active? I've noticed similar but when I check the communities I'm subscribed to, it turns out it's largely because they're less active than those communities I'm seeing more posts from.
  Even more apparent when I switch to viewing only my subscribed communities feed.
- I would also like a sort that favours posts on subbed communities, while still browsing 'everything'
- a default sort that favors smaller communities
  Someone should make an issue on that in the github!
  
  I think there's an update with that but I'm not entirely sure.
  
  They are already working on that, not sure if it's in the 1.19 release that is coming soon or not - but it is being worked on
- a default sort that favors smaller communities
  the Scaled sort option is in v0.19.0, you can see a preview of this on https://voyager.lemmy.ml/

part of the reason why some communities stick and some dont is because the type of people who were willing to jump to lemmy. Users who jumped to lemmy generally were more tech forward, privacy forward, or was part of some ostracized community not very welcome on reddit, as the typical casual user does not care for site politics.
its really hard to start a small community with one main poster, and requires a few to get the ball rolling. its a game of converting those in the niche communities to make the jump
- I personally made the jump, caz I'm trying to be more conscious about my digital life. When I hopped on here, asked this and that, read/wrote comments, the community was just so much better (still is). This wholesome, selfless, helpful bunch in one place. I really can't care about not being a terraria fandom alive here (one of my most active subs for a while). I stay for the people.
  also lemmy memes suck, wtf guys, post funny things pls
  
  i think lemmy isnt a bastion of hope for media its just another thing to doom scroll on. people think theyre fighting the good fight because theyre doom scrolling another app. stop thinking about the company exploiting you. youre literally exploiting yourself by wasting so much time scrolling.
  this app will likely never grow because theres no necessity this fills except for niche linux bros. at least theres a place for those weirdos to congregate now.
- Yeah I figured go/baduk would be a hard community to start, which is one of the reasons I chose the Chiefs.
  But this isn’t just the difficulty of growing a community from a small start, this is seeing a community grow then shrink. Going through many niche communities the post rate and comment rate seems down across the board, outside of the biggest communities on the site. Combatting a shrinking community seems even more difficult than growing from a small start.
  
  still part of the network effect – some users were willing to give up Reddit and start a new community on Lemmy but the rest of the community stayed behind – the ones heading back to Reddit are more about the community than about where it’s located

There are a few niche communities that are doing well here. The Trekkies that meme over at risa, the NCD crowd and their Military-Industrial Complex fetish, and the meme community in general is fairly healthy and active.
But I agree with you that there isn't that critical mass that Reddit has that allows organic niche growth to occur. We're simply too small. Even small Reddit communities like /r/Kenshi (131k) or /r/Factorio (347k) have more subscribers than the entirety of all Lemmy instances (60k). It's impossible to compete when there is such a mismatch of scale, especially against behemoths like /r/funny with subscriber bases in the millions.
What can we do? Just keep making this place our home. Post interesting things you find on the Internet, copypasta memes, that sort of stuff. I don't know if it'll grow it but if enough of us do this it won't stagnate.
- Risa and other meme subs are perhaps a bit too successful. I already unsubscribed from one men’s sub and am thinking about risa because they just dominate my feed too much.
- Risa is something else at the moment lol.. gee wilikers
  Go them!

I'm sole mod (not the original creator, but took over when they went awol) for the knitting community at !knitting@lemmy.world, and I do my best to contribute a lot to the cross stitch & embroidery one at !lemmy_stitch@sh.itjust.works too. This is coming from a history of running various niche online groups. So a few things I would advise:
First, just accept that some topics are too niche. They were too niche for Reddit as well, at one point. People got overexcited and wanted to mark their territory by setting up a ton of communities when they were new to Lemmy, but reality doesn't work that way and a lot of those spaces just aren't needed. We'd be better served combining posts from these into slightly more general combined communities, and perhaps leaving a sticky post in the tiny niche ones letting everyone know where to head to for that topic.
But if your topic is big enough to in theory get decent traction:
Be grateful for what users you do have. You said you sometimes get "few" replies, so make sure you're getting to know those people and replying to them and continuing the conversation where appropriate. You don't need a lot of users, you just need a few engaged ones to make for a nice community.
Recruit your friends. You're a Chiefs fan, you probably know other Chiefs fans. Get them interested.
Drop your community link wherever its relevant. People don't like having to put effort into finding new communities but if they just happen to come across mention of it, they'll click. Obviously I'm not saying spam, but there are plenty of sports fans here and it's bound to come up in conversation.
Crosspost. Any posts you make to a Chiefs community are probably also relevant to the wider NFL communities or maybe fantasy football players. And again this just gives more people the chance to stumble across the fact that you exist.
Ok these next couple are more involved, but they do work well!
Consider Mastodon. I have a craft-focused account there too, and if I have a question about knitting or cross stitch or whatever then the more answers I can get the better, right? So I use the fact that we can post from Mastodon, to a Lemmy community, combining the replies from both audiences in one thread. Example of what I mean here.
Create value. Could be by posting pillar content that's actually useful (in your case could be some kind of statistical analysis, we all know the football nerds love it, but whatever will be long-term useful / interesting to your audience). Or it could be a regular community event or something ("predict the Chiefs wins/losses for the upcoming season and win something, etc etc).
Ask your existing users what they'd like to see from the community. Some things you try will hit and some will miss, but getting feedback is going to up your chances!
That's everything off the top of my head and it's already a wall of text so I'll stop there. It is absolutely difficult to be a mod, it can be a lot of work to get to the point of just having an active community that doesn't need your input to keep rolling. But if your community see you trying, I think that goes a long way. Hope some of this was helpful!
- I really like the mastodon suggestion, thank you!
  
  Happy to help! I know it sounds kind of weird, posting from another platform. But if you look at it less as "how can I make MY community with MY name on it the BEST so everyone will worship ME" and more "how can I actually bring people together over a shared topic" it makes a lot of sense :)
  I do wish the integration was a bit better though. It's got its quirks, to put it mildly!

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.

Once scaled sort arrives on Lemmy, smaller communities will be ranked higher and not knocked out by the meme communities and stuff like that.
- Is there an ETA for that feature?
  
  Once v0.19.0 releases (soon)
- Counting down the days!
- It seems this will only be useful for people who have subscribed to smaller communities - it'd just fuck up the default view if implemented there.

Anyone that was around while Reddit was growing will remember that there were few subreddits to begin with. I think fediverse needs that to happen before expanding.
I don’t know how to fix it. Maybe sub-feddits need to be pruned if they aren’t thriving. Maybe tags in titles would be more helpful until they have enough content to warrant their on category.

There's always going to be an activity difference given the userbase gap, but it's a mistake imho to see a slow-paced community as "dead". As long as it has active subscribers, any post will get votes and comments from people who see it, even if it's been weeks or months since the last post in that community. Slower-paced, but still there for whatever content gets posted.
- I agree with this, but I think many subscribers are from accounts that are no longer active.
  
  I'm not sure if the mod tools make this easier, but you could measure a community's engagement by taking the total number of upvotes/downvotes comments for all posts, and dividing by the number of subscribers in the community. This would at least be a measurement to quantify a decline or steady state over time. Obviously perception matters, if people feel like a community is dead, they'll leave, and it'll be a self fulfilling prophecy.

Niche communities either need to cohere on their own, or live on a site that's large enough to sustain them. Spreading activity over too many communities/mags/subs/channels/whatever will make things seem even less active, and will make participation less appealing. People will always drop out, and if people don't "drop in" through search or discovery, activity obviously can only go down.
Meanwhile the fediverse has other issues - it is inherently "techy" and most major selling points are things "casuals" just don't give a shit about. Also, some of them just aren't true - it really sucks if you traipse up here with the expectation of less "site politics" and admin fuckery, and then run into you-know-which instances, instances being run maliciously, weird federation/defederation antics etc.
The fediverse as a concept and the lemmy.world-aligned part of it both have serious issues that could make activity hard to increase by putting off both existing and prospective users.
- Yeah, the amount of Tankies here is JARRING. Up until this point I had been someone who fell in the "Communism is a nice ideal, but in the real world its never panned out and may be likely to always pan out the way it has done so so far when tried", and it took like a WEEK on Lemmy to go from that to "No fucking WONDER communism has always ended up the way it has"
  
  It absolutely is, although I'm not even talking about communism specifically. I'm basically a socdem and a leftist (as far as actual, normal society goes - less so for Lemmy, obviously), though that's completely irrelevant. It's all about... just shitty behavior, false flagging, wannabe-authoritarian, bad-faith, trolling, dishonest bullshit. Question communities like this and asklemmy are chock-full of thinly veiled soapboxing and questions loaded more heavily than a thousand cargo ships. Even if you agree with the basic points, it's fucking obnoxious. Not only that, it's bloody stupid and a prime example of shooting oneself in the foot, at least if the idea was ever that more than about forty people would use this thing.
  Reddit was full of subs where the (often right-wing or particularly right-wing tolerant but not exclusively) twats-in-charge banned you from subs or the site at the drop of a hat. This was a major selling point for the fediverse - why if that happens on the fediverse, it's Decentralized so you'd just blahdiblahdiblah. In reality, though, several communities - the only active ones in many cases - are apparently sticking around on instances where the only difference from r/conservative or whatever is the paintjob on aforementioned twat-in-charge and their views. If they're not condoning "power" abuse, trolling and spam from even more blatantly bad-faith instances, they certainly aren't doing anything to mitigate it. That doesn't really look dramatically better as far as fairness and tolerance go.

There is already a word for "reverse degrowth." That word is "growth." (Or "grow," possibly "regrow" in your context.)
I have not much else to add other than I am continuing to post on Lemmy regardless of whether or not it becomes popular. I'm pretty much the only voice in the two communities I'm most active in, and if that winds up with me just shouting into the void about topics I like, well... I'll still do it, because t that's what I enjoy doing. Maybe some day, maybe not. Fuck it.
- There is already a word for "reverse degrowth." That word is "growth."
  😆 Love it, ya made me audibly laugh, because you are correct, and OP was so stuck in his head frustrated about this that he was thinking in double negatives 😆
  
  The context I was trying to show that growing a community with continuous progress is different than taking a community that is shrinking, stopping the shrinking, and then causing positive growth.

I would suggest we add community nesting. It would allow people to easier find new communities and post in small communities without risking that no-one sees it

Reddit will continue to fuck up and people will continue to come here. Give it time. Eventually, Reddit will fall apart.

I think it's the same as any other platform. Right now the content in small communities is limited, but over time once there is a sizable amount of content that newcomers can get referred from or go through, Lemmy as a whole will get more traction. Since the Reddit exodus happened I definitely feel like Lemmy has grown a lot and I'm here for the long run.

Probably an unpopular viewpoint, but Lemmy and Mastodon proponents need to suck it up and go be on Reddit and Twitter now and then just to advertise lemmy and mastodon. If no one is talking about these platforms there, no one will be thinking about migrating here. I went to Reddit for some specific emulation communities a day or so ago, and people there are asking where they can find piracy communities that don’t get banned, and it was appreciated when I mentioned you can find them here. Lemmy just isn’t talked about and given exposure unless someone already on lemmy makes the effort, and talking about it here constantly doesn’t make any difference.
- Been wondering about that.
  A few years ago I took on the practice of (as a writer) posting on FFN only to announce that my stories are on AO3. Try and drive the reader engagement from the bad site to the cool site and all that. Presumably what is intended here is that eg.: if I find a post / subject of discussion that I want to comment on on Reddit, what I do is post in an equivalent Lemmy community (or Kbin magazine, for that matter) and point to it in a Reddit post? Kinda like "read my comments on this subject here [link]"?
  Interestingly, that'd be not too different from how one does with a blog, yes?
  I like the model in that it's kinda instant awareness - there's almost no way to miss that the link goes to a different domain, among other things. What I wonder however is how much effective would it be at drawing in people vs being disregarded as (and even being modop'd away as) an ad.
  
  Well, probably the best way is to just post a piece of actual content, original or stolen (edit: I mean like a meme, anything that's recycled constantly), retweeted or whatever, with a reply of your own or a separate post that says something like "follow me on all my channels at" and list them. The common thread between these two services is that they are the main decentralized ones (but all other decentralized ones, like Pixelfed, the Instagram fediverse, suffer from the same problem), and it's that structure that throws off a lot of people. It took me a while, too, just because I had to research wtf was going on and figure out where to get started. There's one person on Twitter who sends out a daily reminder that they can be also found on bluesky, threads, post, spoutible, and their own website. Bluesky is the oddball as technically it's part of the decentralized landscape, except there's no decision making process at the beginning to choose what server to start on, everyone is onboarded at the same place. Regardless, that person would probably also add Mastodon to the list, if they weren't confused by the lack of a single choice.
  But then people stopped talking about Mastodon on Twitter, other than maybe to just have their Mastodon address in their Twitter bio if anyone happened to look, and the Reddit exodus slowed down as all the motivated people were already on Lemmy and not talking about it as an alternative on Reddit.
  And it is effective, which is why Elon has at various time blocked links to Mastodon, Bluesky, Post, etc, and then unblocked later due to backlash over the obvious double standard when he's complaining about freedom of speech so much. (Including Substack, which is where that Twitter Files guy Matt Taibbi tried to move his posts after his views tanked once Blue subscriptions and views got prioritized. I'm not a follower, just an observer on that one.) He's afraid of the competition, and people finding out where else to be. And right now is a perfect time to be doing this, because people on Twitter want to get away from the antisemitic twat running the place where nothing is censored or banned, and certain Reddit communities are still annoyed by bans, or having content posts deleted by high-up admins due to takedown requests from Nintendo, etc. Or discord servers getting banned for similar reasons.
  It's just an issue of no ongoing exposure, and structural confusion from those used to a single place where everything happens for a platfrom.

Contribute to them and invite people.

I saw a bunch of posts from @rglullis@communick.news promoting a project called fediverser which at first i thought was just like lemmit didn't see the need for it. The main difference is that not just posts are imported into Lemmy, but also the comments. The idea is that for each reddit user who comments, that comment is added to a shadow profile in Lemmy and commented on the post. The idea being over time, the reddit users will have profiles in Lemmy already populated, that they can take ownership of, and don't have to start from scratch finding an instance or creating an account.
Obviously everyone has their opinions of it, but maybe it'd work out for the Kerbal Space Program community, since Lemmy is more technically focused. This might remove a barrier of entry for new users joining your communities.
- This guy...
- That sounds like it has some privacy implications that don't sound too agreeable. Posts you make on one site being duplicated on another site without your knowledge or consent is an ethical breach of trust.
  
  What about "privacy" is being violated when every post and submission is public and indexable by any search engine?
  
  Reddit states in the privacy policy that they are already sharing this information already:
  How We Share Information
  Much of the information on the Services is public and accessible to everyone, even without an account. By using the Services, you are directing us to share this information publicly and freely.
  When you submit content (including a post, comment, or chat message) to a public part of the Services, any visitors to and users of our Services will be able to see that content, the username associated with the content, and the date and time you originally submitted the content. Reddit allows other sites to embed public Reddit content via our embed tools. Reddit also allows third parties to access public Reddit content via the Reddit API and other similar technologies.

Go chiefs! I’m from KC so it’s cool to see a community on lemmy—and I had no idea it existed until right now.
I feel the exact same way my friend. Even when lemmy was on the rise (when I joined), I knew that it wasn’t going to receive wide adoption. And unfortunately wide adoption is exactly what is needed to solve the problems you have mentioned.
As much as I love the idea of lemmy, I like the idea of community and connection more. I say go to the places where you find those things because that will be the most meaningful to you. You may find that for a more privacy and free thinking community on lemmy, but for other topics you probably have to go elsewhere. For now.
So go and connect with people over things that you love!
- Not only the Chiefs, there is an instance with communities for all NFL teams

First and foremost, let's get this out of the way...
Fuck the Chiefs.
Now that we've cleared up that order of business, yes, it is disappointing that there aren't many niche communities. I still have to go to /r/raiders because there is little to no activity on the Raiders instances I found. Granted, I'll admit, I'm kinda part of the problem bc when I looked them up, I just saw the posts were outdated and old, and never bothered engaging, or trying to make those communities happen. I remember they blacked out our sub for a day or week or whatever, and nothing really came of it. Engagement seems the same. I'm guessing sports communities as a whole don't really care about the bs reddit pulled w 3rd party apps, and probably were less likely to have been using a 3rd party app or cared. I remember seeing comments along the lines of "good, glad the sub's back. What were y'all even trying to accomplish with your little protest anyways?" I wish people did care because I have to use the shitty mobile site for reddit bc I'm for sure not installing their dumpster fire app.
- I think you make a good point about whether the reddit bs is the kind of thing that certain communities would likely find offensive.
  Obviously subs about data privacy would be more offended than a Raiders community.

Time. This has happened a million times. The regular pattern is an explosion, a correction, then slow growth either until that platform becomes the new bad guy or gets destroyed by the government.

degrowth
I know one way.
- Un-degrowth?
  
  Regressive Reverse negative down-growth?
  
  Undegrowth, what happens when I see my wife naked for the millionth time

I feel you.

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