Fedigrow
To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
Resources:
- https://lemmy-federate.com/ to federate your community to a lot of instances
- [email protected] to organize overall fediverse growth
- [email protected] to keep tabs on where new users might come from :)
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Megathreads:
- How (and when) to consolidate communities? (A guide)
- Where to request inactive or unmoderated communities? (A list)
Rules:
- Be respectful
- No bigotry
The generalist advice only works for topics that are not controversial. If there is any outrage in the discussion talking in the general area will be very negative and never get into the core issue you want to discuss
As someone who runs multiple niche health and diet communities I can literally feel the burn everytime the topic comes up in a general discussion.
Here is a community promo post for a diet community https://hackertalks.com/post/8398344 50% downvotes and 31 comments all negative
Here is the first introduction post for the community https://hackertalks.com/post/5677435 75% downvotrs, and 40ish all negative comments
I'm just trying to illustrate how anything controversial needs to be protected and sheltered for meaningful growth. All the negativity that can be delivered has a real chilling effect on new user participation
I agree, this is why I launched only a single community on my new instance called [email protected] - on instance [email protected] - federated for all your general bullshiting needs. Post whatever is on your mind, helps if you're funny.
I think both ways work. Obviously if there is a demand not being filled, filling it would be good.
But also, sometimes people don't even know they want a thing until they are presented with it. Example: Funhole.
The problem is that trying to talk about very specific things in a general community will just result in silence if no one in the general community knows/cares about the very specific thing.
On Reddit, you can type /r/nameofanygame and find a sub populated by people who also found it that way. This obviously cannot work on Lemmy, not outside of a few very very very popular games. But for games that are too niche to have fandom spaces here, directing the niche fandom elements to [email protected] isn't likely to fit there either. Some of my favorite games are titles that I might just literally be the only person on Lemmy who plays them, so I just don't think there's any kind of space for them, general or specific.
I play a lot of Riichi Mahjong, and I saw that [email protected] already exists, so when I see some interesting content I try tossing it over there in the hopes that if I keep doing so, maybe at some point more people will eventually join me. Would I be better off posting to [email protected] because generalist good, specific bad? Probably not, I doubt anyone there is interested in deep technical What Would You Discard? analysis. Maybe the most surface level casual/beginner content might fit in, I could crosspost a basic How to Play tutorial there, but content that is too specific doesn't make sense in that kind of community.
Some of my favorite games are titles that I might just literally be the only person on Lemmy who plays them, so I just don’t think there’s any kind of space for them, general or specific.
What genre are those games? There is
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
So maybe there is a genre category that your game could belong to?
lol I have been trying to compile a list of all active video game genre communities to release here at some point, thanks for helping me with some I did not know of, here's what I had so far
- [email protected] (also has puzzle and interactive fiction)
- [email protected] (replaces dead feddit.de community)
- [email protected]
- [email protected] (replaces dead feddit.de community)
- [email protected]
- [email protected] (for quick once-a-day web games like Wordle)
- [email protected]
- [email protected] and [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
I play a fair amount of stuff, some mainstream enough to post here, some not. But genre-wise I'd say my biggest favorites are fighting games and versus puzzle games.
[email protected] exists, and I do post there occasionally. But the games I play (Skullgirls, Them's Fightin' Herds, Under Night In-Birth) are the niche-within-a-niche, I've drifted off from the wider mainstream FGC.
Versus puzzle games... I'm the guy who been very disgruntled over the fact that the genre as a whole is dead and buried. There's just not much of a community for these games anywhere anymore.
Last year I published a video essay about how Sega's mismanagement slowly killed Puyo Puyo. I did post that one to a few communities here, because "In-depth video essay about a game you've never played but will still find interesting by the end of this video" is a genre that can fit into a general space.
But that kind of video essay is the only type of content that I think I could post here. I don't expect anyone to take an interest in competitive highlights, coaching, analysis, etc. Last week we got some more news about Sega screwing up again, but that's still not something I'd expect to generate discussion here.
It's not just how niche the games themselves are, but the distinction between the type of content that fits a general space versus content only hardcore fans will even understand, let alone take an interest in.
Somehow [email protected] has also absorbed puzzle games there. Not where I'd think to look but okay.
If you made a puzzle game community I'd totally follow and post whenever I see one.
Sadly I do not really engage with video essays because… ugh, video, I'd rather read an article. Shame, because I wish I could say "I'll engage with this high quality content!" but truth is I have some I reject on personal tastes too. But I promise there are people who will, even if it is only a few. Speaking as someone trucking on with some communities of like… one other person, and I am lucky to have even gotten them because I was screaming at the void for awhile now.
For some groups there is no visible demand because they are too niche for general discussions.
Do you have any examples in mind?
On Reddit there's a couple (animal) trapping subreddits, one of which I run. While very active they typically have less than 100 people in them.
I could see a something like a generalist Hobbies communities leading to the creating of a more niche Trapping one
I don't think "hobbies" makes sense as a generalist community. No one is interested in "hobbies" as a general concept, they're interested in their own specific hobby. Trying to consolidate completely unrelated hobbies into one space in the hopes that more people will subscribe won't work if those people have no common ground to discuss together in that space.
I think something you're missing is that "we create communities as needed" has an inverse as well. "We delete communities as needed". Sometimes you create the general topic and it's so general that all of the niches overtake it. When that happens and the general just isn't needed, you prune it. No community has to exist forever and sometimes it's only purpose will be as a reference point to others. And sometimes even that isn't needed anymore and it vanishes too.
It's a constantly changing, dynamic system. The point is that it should cater to what's needed/being used at the moment.
At this moment, there are at least a few manual hobbies that could coexist on the same community
They don't have to be as interested in the other ones as their own niche, but at least they can share space and activity.
You could potentially have an "outdoor hobbies" with fishing, camping, animal trapping etc.
You kind of already see this when all of those hobbies can post to [email protected]
A good example would be [email protected]. I don't remember seeing anything about Formula 1 outside of this community, yet it exists, and people have some discussions.
I was also thinking about [email protected] and [email protected]. Theoretically, the chain should look like this: general discussion -> gaming -> flightsim -> xplane. In practice, the last two are so small that it's hard to imagine them manifesting in a general discussion about games. The example of Baldur's Gate 3 is way too simplistic given how enormously popular that game is.
Both flightsim communities are practically dead. Does that mean they shouldn't exist and that they can't grow without notable demand elsewhere? I don't know. I want to try and test that hypothesis by adding content. I just know from my experience that when I'm searching for a niche community and see it's dead, I drop it. But if there's even minimal activity, I might subscribe and participate.
FYI, lemmyfly.org is on sale, the instance doesn't exist anymore
If you want to keep [email protected] active, you can promote it on [email protected], and probably other flight communities like [email protected]
on sale
I'd probably use "for sale" in this context. "On sale" colloquially means "available at reduced price", and GoDaddy's price for lemmyfly (4.9k$) seems pretty high for a .org.
I think what needs to be tacked on is you need the generalized communities to point to the niches. Sure, you can start the formula1 or flightsim community immediately - that group already exists outside the fediverse and you just need to give them a new location. Sure.
But for your niche communities, you need the general community to be a launching off point for the others. You need the gamer who's interested in different controllers to see the other flightsim community exists and decide to follow it too. You need to give the average person a way to discover the community without already knowing explicitly that it exists.
Otherwise, you'll only attract people who are migrating from one service to another(and doing a 1:1 swap of their communities) and not reach the general audience. A lot of hobbies or communities I've joined were because of someone else mentioning it in a different but related community.
Think about people in general: no one starts by saying they want to program data tables in Python. They start with a general interest in computers and move on from there.
Otherwise, you’ll only attract people who are migrating from one service to another(and doing a 1:1 swap of their communities) and not reach the general audience. A lot of hobbies or communities I’ve joined were because of someone else mentioning it in a different but related community.
I don't see how we contradict each other. I didn't say we shouldn't create general communities. My point was that we don't necessarily need to wait for a visible demand in a general community because it might never manifest itself for smaller things, although people might be silently looking for them.
We don't really disagree. I think you should make the communities. But I also think they won't grow until they're being mentioned on the general community.