I think the biggest problem with bootstrapping niche communities is that people interested in those topics have to search for and find the communities. There are a few resources for finding new communities such as https://lemmyverse.net/communities and the Reddit migration community, but it takes some effort.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I found this community finder a few days ago, and its really helped me find what I'm looking for

[–] Hazdaz 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yes and it doesn't help that communities change servers or something and apparently if you don't change the settings you lose them from your subscribed list.

Seems like a rather shortsighted way of doing things if you ask me.

Also someone posted that the same name can be used on multiple instances, so like do you have to subscribe to all of them? Why have so many? Why would that be allowed? Makes little sense.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

That's just a consequence of decentralization. That's why all names are qualified by the instance name as well. It's not perfect, but we'll, on Reddit if someone picked the sub name you wanted then you're sol and have to choose a different name, so there's pros and cons to each. Simply subscribe to the most active version of the community you're interested in and network effects will pick the winner.