To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
Resources:
Community discovery 100% needs to be improved somehow. No matter how many popular posts you make you will heavily struggle getting the ball rolling, if you ever do.
This practically guarantees the death of niches, which is [obviously] not good for the fediverse as a whole.
Don't people use the Subscribed feed for their niche communities? So once they are subbed, it's all good?
If the issue is people not knowing about communities, then those posts on [email protected] should help
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule influences this heavily imo
I think it's both. On latin for example i have 120 users (35 are lemmy federate bots) but i'm the only one posting there, despite some posts getting a lot of upvotes or comments.
This can heavily discourage mods and force them to quit which kills the community.
I'm coming up on 1,000 subscribers, 500 posts, and 1.5+yrs of content creation in my bandes dessinées sublemmy, with myself being responsible for maybe 85-90% of total content creation. Your concerns are real and valid IMO.
Soon I plan to set up a bot to post small, 'drip-like' content every other day, supplementing the off-days with my beefier content, which are generally small reviews and content roundups. I guess my point is that it's good to keep trying different techniques out, asking this and other communities for ideas, and having requisite patience.
Also, I think light-handed advertising across various platforms probably helps. Imgur and Reddit have worked okay so far, but frankly I need someone to help with other social media joints. That's something an active mod could potentially help with...
My reflex moving over was to subscribe to everything I’m interested in and never use all, because I’ve never used it on reddit.
This created a problem where since lemmy’s sorting all basically sort by most popular (except scaled but that sort is problematic for other reasons), I basically only saw the meme and news communities I subscribed to on my feed and the niche stuff never made it.
I know @[email protected] is working on an algorithmic alternative [email protected] but it’s not got support on any apps.
I usually use scaled for my subscribed feed and it works decently. Recently was advised to try out "newest comments" sorting for the subscribed feed and I like that even more!
have you tried Scaled sort? I use Scaled for my subscribed feed and it does a great job showing new posts in niche communities
Not everyone follows that though
Then I'll keep posting about it everywhere I guess
Just followed it
Oh! Today I learned about community promo. Yeah, I guess we could use awareness raising about the existence of that community. Sounds like an awesome resource.
I posted it on [email protected], is this were you heard about it?
I'll probably post on [email protected] next week, and probably [email protected] as well.
Maybe create a meme about it on [email protected] too.
Is this a community discovery issue, though? If it's a popular post in an unpopulated community, people must be seeing it. So, it doesn't sound like an issue with impressions.
It's an issue with conversions. With visibility not translating unto subscriptions. And that's a totally different problem. If I see a post in Local or in All, and it's interesting, I'll upvote it, but that's not going to get me to subscribe. For that, I need to a) be interested in the community topic according to its name (because I am not clicking into the community), and b) I need to see multiple interesting posts from that community. And if those thresholds are reached, and I subscribe, that doesn't secure my engagement. Just that you'll show up in my Subscribed feed.
All of those are hurdles for a nascent community, and neither are a discoverability issue.
There could definitely be better ranking options for feeds, but if the posts in question are already "popular", that doesn't seem to be the issue.
I guess fxomt misphrased "how popular". You can have a "quite popular" post for your community (let's see, more than 100 upvotes), it will probably never break through the rest of the posts as people generally use Top Day or 12 hours.
Frontpage on LW is currently at 400 for the latest post: https://lemmy.world/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&sort=TopDay
The expectation that a social media that optimistically has 0.1% the user base of reddit, can support the same level of community fragmentation, is not realistic. I've been here long enough to see numerous failed attempts at starting a community for My Favorite Niche, rather than just posting about it in More General Community. You usually get a single "welcome" post by the creator, and then nothing more. If you're lucky, the creator will make a small handful of their own posts before giving up.
Post about your favorite TV show in a tv/movies community, don't make a new one just for your show. You'll get way more engagement
Post about your favorite TV show in a tv/movies community, don’t make a new one just for your show.
I agree, but I also don't want to spam those communities lol.
Like [email protected] or [email protected] would be too much spam for one of the gaming communities, or patient gamers.
And it'd be even more spammy for the communities that are in-between in specificity (like [email protected] or [email protected])
I just do rare cross-posts for the most notable posts
Oh yeah, if you can sustain those communities by yourself, that's great! This advice is more for people who don't know where to post about a specific topic
Those are my thoughts, in no particular order.
I just added a "new communities" block to the sidebar on https://piefed.social/
Thanks for the idea! It seems so obvious in retrospect.
Community discovery sucks so much IMO
I think part of it is that searching isn't intuitive. Some of the apps make it easier, but some are bad at it. The web interface for a newcomer isn't set up where you can just scan the page and see a friendly spot to go at it. You have to look for it. It isn't hard to find, and anyone familiar with the internet should know where to look, but it is a barrier.
I say that because I've had people irl complain about it when trying to use lemmy for the first time.
I just checked, LW still has this on their banner:
Not ideal, but probably something other instances could maybe emulate
Maybe it would also be helpful to have a "welcome message" that a new user of a lemmy instance receives as a notification after registration. This message could include information about community discovery, information about different instances, frontends, and so on. (Each instance should be able to have their own "welcome message", of course.)
here's the Github feature request for this https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1807
Give it a thumbs up reaction so the devs know to prioritize it
I wonder if any 3rd party apps do this?
That is a great idea! I never use a browser for lemmy after signup so I've never seen it bait before
I think that there are a few things to consider here:
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.
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?
Oh, I totally missed that one - so ... maybe somehow highlight the scaled filter better or provide a better explanation what it exactly is doing?
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
Thank you for the explanation :)
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.
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.
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] @[email protected] and @[email protected], curious to hear your thoughts about it.
1.) I believe that the discovery is bad and this is why I'm working on [email protected] where the goal is to index the communities for people to discover something to follow even if they weren't looking for that specifically. I plan to push a huge update to it somewhere next month.
I think that some community (users, not mods) managed recommendation system where you recommend related communities for you to display on the sidebar would be great too. But that's just an another idea that would never see the light of the day in development. Some communities have sidebars where mods link to related communities but it's really not flexible enough to link communities to each other easily.
2.) Missing enough people is definitely the biggest problem there because even if people knew about the communities someone still needs to populate them and ideally organically instead of it being 1-2 chronic posters.
3.) Revisiting expectations is definitely needed but generalising communities too much is not ideal because if I want to follow one thing but not the other then I would be stuck with lots of content I don't care about. There needs to be some middle ground on that. I have a few imaginary communities on themes I enjoy and mod a few others to help out with moderation. I don't want them to be merged into one blob without a theme going on. This is also why I and the other mod refused to move our communities to [email protected] which doesn't focus on our preferred niches. But depending on how post tags get implemented in lemmy I would be willing to move to your community. But my requirements would be high like being able to subscribe to only posts from a specific community with specific tags and being able to easily filter posts in community view. Also blacklisting. Basically allowing you to have things in one community but being able to interact with posts as if they were separate ones.
4.) I also think that mod tools and community settings to protect the community and give it direction are severely lacking. For example something like this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5360
5.) Not being able to create your own custom feeds is also a massive problem because you can't split your feed into types like memes/news/discussions/meta etc. Low traffic communities get buried in your feed when you subscribe to them making things bad for the growth. And because everything is mixed together it makes things a bit less pleasant to browse as well. If I could use different feeds for different moods I would definitely interact with lemmy and content I like more because it would be easily available.
And some other issues that I'm not remembering right now.
Not being able to create your own custom feeds is also a massive problem because you can’t split your feed into types like memes/news/discussions/meta etc.
Summit can do this https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.idunnololz.summit&hl=en_US
They call it a "multi-community"
Low traffic communities get buried in your feed when you subscribe to them
I use Subscribed+Scaled sort to fix this issue, it's my default sort method
Apologies for only arriving now. The app I use is pretty hit and miss with sending notifications and mentions are in another tab and rare. I really need to do some more shopping around for apps but I'm in a comfort zone with this one I've been using since before the API debacle on Reddit.
As far as discoverability goes, as a simple user I'm not sure it's so different from Reddit. On Reddit, niche communities coming through /r/all were rare and easy to miss. So the main way of finding these communities was by directly searching for them or coming across mentions of them in comment sections. I'm not expecting to come across a community for some random '90s show in the wild, so that's just something to search up if I think of it (and probably be disappointed because this platform isn't quite there yet).
As for more general communities, they'll have higher activity so will come through whatever feed you're looking at more often. I've found that by the end of the day, I'm just starting to scroll through the things I've seen before, so it's not easy to miss things. Plus users such as yourself do a fantastic service of pointing others in the right direction and making suggestions.
And I think that for now, super specific communities would probably flop. I would love a community for the Harley Quinn show, for example, with memes and discussions throughout the week and between seasons like on Reddit. But there's not enough people yet, so the DC Studios community for anything related to DC Comics adaptations is the way for now. Just as an example. Or to go with your example, a general JRPG community is going to do much better than a Golden Sun specific community.
Certain missing features here versus Reddit definitely play a role too though. If there were multicommunities or some sort of custom feeds for people to add, any niche communities that tried to take off would have a much better chance. Also, I don't see too many OnlyFans workers coming to LemmyNSFW as long as they can't make a post with all of their links to their own profile and pin it, and they can't pick up followers. It can't completely fill the role of a Reddit alternative as long as it only has half the features that Reddit has. At least as far as the end user is concerned.
For [email protected], it's a big enough category that it should be more active than it is. The corresponding subreddits for JRPGs and retro gaming aren't super far apart at 255k and 404k subscribers respectively, but [email protected] is more active by orders of magnitude here on Lemmy.
I've started to focus more on discussion prompts in the community as news isn't enough; the JRPG community has been an excellent news aggregator for over a year now (although it's a slow news time for the genre currently). I'd love to hear from other niche communities about what's worked and what hasn't to drive engagement.
I might be completely wrong here, but could it partly being an issue of people not thinking about searching the term JRPG?
I wonder if instance admins should start closing old/redundant communities, just so the good ones are easier to find
They definitely should. [email protected] is a good example, I asked the admin to get mod rights there, it's in progress
Discovery still needs to be improved. And we need more active members, that would be delusional to say otherwise.
But I also think a unified linking mechanism between instances, communities, threads and to a specific message in any thread no matter the instance the reader is clicking the link from would help encourage people to link a lot more. I don't link as much as I would like to mostly because of that reason. And more links would also help discoverability of interesting content.
On our new user application, we have a question for 'What communities you would most like to participate in.'
When I read through those applications, a lot of the time I remember communities that would fit what they're looking for. While we could send them some links in an introductory message, it would be better to crowdsource that information.
If we can encourage people to ask about communities, that might help? I could do more of that myself, since I don't think I've ever asked before.
[email protected] allows request posts, and if the volume gets to high we can redirect people to [email protected] (or equivalent communities) so users can stay subscribed to CommunityPromo without seeing question spam in their feeds