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Is there any way to reverse degrowth of the niche communities on Lemmy? (self.nostupidquestions)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by moeggz to c/nostupidquestions

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Like others, I came over when Reddit was banning 3rd party apps. Many communities were being started and I wanted to help. So I chose one community to form here and try and grow. And we did! There was a time a short while in the little KC Chiefs community was in the top 100 communities on Lemmy world. I knew that wouldn’t last that we would be outpaced by many more broad appeal communities but I didn’t predict the reverse in engagement growth that has come. Stagnation sure, I didn’t think Lemmy was going to surpass reddit for a long while yet, but not the barren communities of today. Meme communities and the “small gripe” adjacent communities are doing fine, but it seems all others have shrunk. I tried to keep the Kerbal Space Program community active for a bit but had to return to the official forums and even subreddit for discussion. The post I made in the Go community here remains the only post in the community.

A platform led by a CEO who edits comments of users, lies about other professionals and then double downs on the lie when proven to be a liar can’t be trusted. And in general I prefer the decentralized open source backbone of Lemmy to the ad ridden, rage bait and bug filled Reddit. I’d love for this to be my full time home for discussing my niche interests but that’s not possible without others engaging with the content.

I posted a lot in the beginning, tried to comment a lot too but now it feels like talking to myself when I make a new post in the community I started and get few or no responses. What can be done? Community specific advice is nice, but I’m looking more for Lemmy World level solutions as I’m sure there’s many many other niche communities I’m not apart of experiencing the same thing.

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

Been wondering about that.

A few years ago I took on the practice of (as a writer) posting on FFN only to announce that my stories are on AO3. Try and drive the reader engagement from the bad site to the cool site and all that. Presumably what is intended here is that eg.: if I find a post / subject of discussion that I want to comment on on Reddit, what I do is post in an equivalent Lemmy community (or Kbin magazine, for that matter) and point to it in a Reddit post? Kinda like "read my comments on this subject here [link]"?

Interestingly, that'd be not too different from how one does with a blog, yes?

I like the model in that it's kinda instant awareness - there's almost no way to miss that the link goes to a different domain, among other things. What I wonder however is how much effective would it be at drawing in people vs being disregarded as (and even being modop'd away as) an ad.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Well, probably the best way is to just post a piece of actual content, original or stolen (edit: I mean like a meme, anything that's recycled constantly), retweeted or whatever, with a reply of your own or a separate post that says something like "follow me on all my channels at" and list them. The common thread between these two services is that they are the main decentralized ones (but all other decentralized ones, like Pixelfed, the Instagram fediverse, suffer from the same problem), and it's that structure that throws off a lot of people. It took me a while, too, just because I had to research wtf was going on and figure out where to get started. There's one person on Twitter who sends out a daily reminder that they can be also found on bluesky, threads, post, spoutible, and their own website. Bluesky is the oddball as technically it's part of the decentralized landscape, except there's no decision making process at the beginning to choose what server to start on, everyone is onboarded at the same place. Regardless, that person would probably also add Mastodon to the list, if they weren't confused by the lack of a single choice.

But then people stopped talking about Mastodon on Twitter, other than maybe to just have their Mastodon address in their Twitter bio if anyone happened to look, and the Reddit exodus slowed down as all the motivated people were already on Lemmy and not talking about it as an alternative on Reddit.

And it is effective, which is why Elon has at various time blocked links to Mastodon, Bluesky, Post, etc, and then unblocked later due to backlash over the obvious double standard when he's complaining about freedom of speech so much. (Including Substack, which is where that Twitter Files guy Matt Taibbi tried to move his posts after his views tanked once Blue subscriptions and views got prioritized. I'm not a follower, just an observer on that one.) He's afraid of the competition, and people finding out where else to be. And right now is a perfect time to be doing this, because people on Twitter want to get away from the antisemitic twat running the place where nothing is censored or banned, and certain Reddit communities are still annoyed by bans, or having content posts deleted by high-up admins due to takedown requests from Nintendo, etc. Or discord servers getting banned for similar reasons.

It's just an issue of no ongoing exposure, and structural confusion from those used to a single place where everything happens for a platfrom.