Gradually we've been seeing the tv and movies or shows and movies communities pick up activity, which is good, and the multiple games communities each seem to be doing okay too.
Entertainment
However, there remains kind of an awkward spot where there's not exactly a general entertainment community (outside of Beehaw, that is) from what I can tell. There is an existing community, [email protected], though that someone could try to pick up and make active.
This could serve as a catchall for some of the more business-oriented news and some of the fluff celebrity chatter, depending on how one wants to go with it. Worth noting for celebrity chatter there is also [email protected] though.
Music
In a similar vein, while there's a variety of music communities, there's only a few generic ones, with the largest outside of Beehaw and Hexbear being the largely undefined Music community on Lemmy World. The lack of definition, that is, no sidebar guidance on what the community may be used for, makes it unclear what the community's expectations/preferences for posts are.
As with entertainment, this could be where more music business news could find its home, alongside some band chatter. Although as with entertainment, there's a music-themed community for the chatter to be found at [email protected] for those interested.
Sports
Likewise with sports, there's a ton of different sports communities, but only two large generic communities to be found on Beehaw and Hexbear (supposing Lemmyverse is accurate). Before any of the more specific sports communities can gain more activity, I think it'd help to have a generic sports community to help people get oriented and find likeminded folks to form whatever specific communities they'd like.
Much like the first two, this could be for sports news and chatter...But unlike the first two, I can't find any generic fluff sports star/team chat communities.
Ideas on How and Where to Organize
In each of these cases regarding broader communities, I think following a similar organizational approach to Beehaw could be a good idea, but they would be better suited to instances more openly federated and not at as much risk of defederation. A few Lemmy instances that come to mind for this are Lemmee, ShitJustWorks, Lemmy Zip, and perhaps Reddthat?
I'm not sure where Mbin instances are in terms of federation smoothness and stability, otherwise I might suggest some of them. On a different note, if there were more Piefed instances I might suggest them, but last I checked the flagship seems to still be the largest and isn't open for community creation.
In short: there's good opportunities for broad, generic topic communities for entertainment, music, and sports on more widely federated instances. At the same time, even where these communities may exist on some widely federated instances, opportunity remains for more clearly defined variations of these communities to encourage posting with less uncertainty.
For entertainment: https://metacritics.zone
For sports: https://athletic.center
Both of these instances (and many others) are part of the network of topic-specific instances that I've created and now I'm looking to find a way to share with other admins.
The only problem at the moment is that I'm the only with access to these instances, but if you want to create new communities I can give you an account on them.
Surprising to see there hasn't been any post since a month on the first one, and no post at all on the second one.
Not that surprising, considering active users around here (like you) refuse to contribute to it.
I just let you another comment on the thread you opened 2 days ago. We can probably continue that discussion there.
I had written a longer response, but I realized that it is pointless to continue there or any discussion with you. Every time I address any of your concerns you came up with a new obstacle. Whenever you were asked to make any form of effort, you refused. This is not the behavior of someone who is serious about coordinating efforts.
It feels immature, like a college student who still depends on their parent's allowance but wants to cosplay as an independent adult.
Not sure why you are owed Blaze's efforts on your instances specifically, and why a "no" prompts such a negative, unflattering comparison. You might not actually believe you are entitled to his efforts, but the harsh comparison in reaction to his "no" is what makes me perceive you as feeling that way. I am really not used to people who don't feel entitled to someone's efforts speaking that way when they refuse.
I appreciate and acknowledge your efforts, I know you made some software to help people find replacement communities for subreddits and to mirror content from other sites to the Fediverse but to be honest this comment leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Especially given all the posts they do make to try to contribute to the Fediverse and grow it—but at least from what I see, they do not want to take on the additional tasks of modding or administrating your instance and you find their reasons unacceptable so you make this comparison, which frankly looks like an attempt to insult them to me.
And that unflattering comparison leaves me somewhat scared to post this comment lest I get one too, for having wrongthink, too much sympathy for someone you think I should not, insert other insults here. But I also figure I should probably speak up instead of getting in the habit of letting my fear of conflict (and lack of experience with seeing people speak harshly to me or others irl) control me especially when I feel I see something that should not have happened.
Did Blaze tell you your communities are all trash or something? I really do not see why you are reacting so harshly.
This is not what I've asked. All I've asked was to look into the content that he was already interested in posting (e.g, tv shows and football) and to do in the communities from the topic-specific instances instead of the bigger "user" instances, and every time there was some random objection to avoid doing it.
The excuses are getting more and more ridiculous. It actually got to the point where the reason to avoid joining the football instance is because of the domain name having "soccer" instead of "football", but at the same time saying "please don't buy a football domain".
The funny thing is, I wouldn't mind at all if he came out and said "no, I don't want to help you", even if there was no particular reason for it. The unbearably annoying thing was this concern trolling, this constant "Oh, I don't mind helping, but only after X".
Thanks for addressing my concern. With this additional context it looks like he's trying to refuse without being straightforward about it (from my end). Although I get it is a tactic to try to be nice instead of hurtful, it often just leads to more hurt, especially when people take the action to do "X" and they still get a "no". Wasted effort trying to convert a "no" to a "yes" that could never be converted, and probably inadvertently pissing off someone who wishes you would just take a hint when you understandably take them at face value because some people do legitimately say "no, for X reason" and could be converted to a "yes" when X is addressed. It would be better for all parties to be straightforward. As someone who cares a lot about being nice and protecting peoples' feelings, it is, in fact, very possible to be straightforward and honest without being rude or hurtful.
Hello,
Thank you for jumping in, I appreciate your concerns.
I'll write a long comment later today to provide the complete context of our pasts interactions with rglullis.
Alright, so here we go. The following links point to specific comments from where you can start reading to see our discussions.
So, in a thread from 23 days ago
Another thread from 14 days ago:
Another thread from 20 days ago:
Another thread from 24 days ago:
Last thread, 3 days ago:
So to summarize
Rgullis position is that
My position is
As a way to try to help him to get why people are not joining, I pointed out that
I already due my due diligence when I choose an instance to host a community I post too. Rglullis do not pass this. I'm not avoiding saying no to him, I think they are a good sysadmin and do a good job, but they need a backup.
Hope that clarifies things a bit.
This is not an accurate representation of what I've been defending:
"Should" is not the right verb, and you are omitting the context. What I have been saying for the past two years already is that if people on the Fediverse don't realize that there are real costs to develop the software and operate the servers, it will never be able to grow, and if you doubt that just see how growth has completely stalled in relation to better funded alternatives like Threads, Bluesky and even Farcaster.
This is not about paying for my servers. It can be about running your own, from home. It can be about getting together with your real life friends and sharing a server. It can be about convincing the IT department of your company to set up a server for their social media.
What I am saying, simply put, is "you'll get what you pay for". I'm saying that those that want the Fediverse to grow need to make significant investment on it. Your idea of "material support" is to "pay for the cost of running the servers", and this is just taking all the work from the developers, instance admins and moderators for granted.
(And no, "I also spend time bringing content and participating, so it should be counted" is not true, because this is just standard usage of the application being developed)
Again, not true. The topic-specific instances are not meant to be a source of revenue for Communick. I never said that I was planning to charge access to those instances, and I never said anything about pushing them to some corporate system.
@[email protected] has already expressed support of the idea and @[email protected] is at least considering it.
The thread was not meant to get input from the admins. The thread was meant to gauge interest from the communities about using it.
There is also issues of "opinion as fact".
First, I don't know where you got the 6500€ number. I said 1700€ for the domains + 2400€ (200€/month) for the servers. My operating costs are ~4000€/year. 4000€ per year for 18 instances amounts to less than 20€/month/instance.
Second, on the occasion that these instances became a more integral part of the Fediverse, it would not be difficult to raise enough money to keep them running. For comparison, the folks from LW are raising ~950€/month on patreon alone and if you go by the rule of thumb that ~2% of users contribute to their instances, the ~360€/month needed for these servers could be raised by less than 20k active users that decided to give 1€/month.
Thirdly, domains like nba.space and nfl.community are valuable. They can help with SEO, they provide legitimacy and (should the community agree) they could be one of the first places to try alternative monetization methods to fund the development of all the Fediverse.
Lastly - and without offense the fact that I have to explain this to you is a strong indicator that you are either very young or financially illiterate - you are hung up on the nominal prices, but all these costs are business expenses. They are sort of a sunk cost already and/or they can be used to deduct from my tax bill.
All in all, this whole part of your argument can be summarized as "I think it is expensive, and I wouldn't pay for that, so I don't think others would/should be interested in it". Your opinion is, just, you know, your opinion, man....
How has that worked out for the people on kbin, or feddit.de, or FMHY?
The question here is not about "small teams" vs "centralized groups". I think the crux of the matter is:
Thanks for providing context, and all the links. I read them, and I really have no idea what to think anymore.
I'm just going to keep posting and I'll probably stay out of any of this discussion in the future.
Sounds good, take care, see you around
The serious efforts I see you do is using this community pretty much solely to promote your own instances. If I was a mod here I'd ban your ass for non stop self promotion :)
Personally, like mentioned before, I won't touch any instances that you run.
I am offering the instances to the wider community, precisely so that they are not "mine".
The easiest way to get me to quit the "self promotion" is quite simple: step up and start putting actual skin in the game to build the infrastructure needed to support more people.
As if the lack of infrastructure was the reason we don't have more users.
It certainly is one of the factors.
We missed a lot of opportunities during Rexxit because Redditors did not know where to go and could not easily find the communities they were interested on, except for the very popular ones.
Then we had the period where people were saying "oh, just send everyone to LW", which did not really help in terms of discovery and basically painted a target on their backs, not to mention that it caused such a problematic dynamic in the federation: given it is the instance with the most people and the most communities, it generates a lot of activities and makes it almost impossible for instances that are away from Europe to keep up.
So, the Lemmy network is a bit capped at the current size. It will only be able to grow 2x if the majority of users end up on LW, and the more users on LW, the bigger the problem gets.
Having instances focused exclusively on being the home of communities would remove the bottleneck and reduce the load on any single instance. It would remove the "which instance to join" problem and it would bring a more clear migration path.
Okay, take care