I've seen the idea of organically growing communities indirectly and directly mentioned in various threads when people discuss which communities they'd like to see on instances, and in a different way in response to community creation announcements. Despite this, and some inconsistent efforts on my own part, I've not seen too many others appear to be trying to put this in action.
I think any of the open-ended chat/conversation/general communities are a good place to start with this, but I've found it tricky to work out what to post to them. I suspect that may be somewhat similar for others, but being in the boat with'em, I'm not sure how to help.
Regardless, I think these communities make more sense for people to find those that share their interests to then start their own communities vs. starting communities before knowing if anyone else is interested.
What do you think, and what do you think would help people feel comfortable posting in these broader communities?
That make a lot of sense: a /c/hobbies makes more sense than making 200 communities for each and every hobby you can think of.
And really it'd just be a case of making sure it gets mentioned and surfaced to people and that the server and mod teams are up to the task of dealing with broad topics and just keeping things civil rather than trying to police content.
I thought about doing a community similar to that for some things but then realized I'm not entirely sure I want to be the "owner" of something that might end up with a lot of traffic and so uh, haven't.