this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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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? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Kind of a companion thread to the recent one on [email protected] 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 [email protected] (now moving to [email protected] ), but there is probably only a level of detail we have to stop at with 47k monthly active users.

One example is [email protected], it seems reasonable active, and is probably a better compromise than having each game having its own community.

Similar with [email protected], or [email protected]. 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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I think that there are a few things to consider here:

  1. Lemmy has a smaller userbase than Reddit so that does mean that we can't have all those niche communities. There are simply not enough people active here to fill a community like /r/writerdecks
  2. If you are starting a community, you have to do the effort to post there. Nobody is posting to a dead community with 2 subscribers and 1 post from 7 month ago. Be active, be kind and post stuff. People will come if that stuff is good. This will help all of Lemmy - federation is great, but you want to read cool stuff and that is bringing people here
  3. There might be room for ... an algorithm. We currently can sort the global feed by "Active", "New", "Last 6 hours" and so on, but there might also be an opportunity for an option like "popular posts in smaller communities".
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

We currently can sort the global feed by “Active”, “New”, “Last 6 hours” and so on, but there might also be an opportunity for an option like “popular posts in smaller communities”.

The "Scaled" filter?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Oh, I totally missed that one - so ... maybe somehow highlight the scaled filter better or provide a better explanation what it exactly is doing?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

or provide a better explanation what it exactly is doing?

I know most people won't go outside of the site to figure this stuff out, but for reference: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html

It's basically the Hot ranking but divided by the number of active users in the community, Subscribed+Scaled is my favorite feed

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Thank you for the explanation :)

[–] Grimy 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

The best would be for apps to let us create feeds. So a user can have an all feed but also his custom technology feed with niche communities and an art feed, etc. If the user can name and choose which communities are added, he can check at a glance, like with the all feed, for the niche communities tailored to his tastes.

I see "active", "last 6 hours", etc as filters as opposed to feeds if that makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

The feature has been announced to have been funded a while ago, not sure when it will arrive, but I personally also think that this is going to be a game changer.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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

They call it a "multi-community"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Well, niche communities can work if you get a big niche community to be on lemmy. For example, the F1 community was super huge and active in 2023, far outranking many other specific communities. However a lot of F1 people seem to have left lemmy in the off-season between 2023 and 2024.