While larger, more general communities are thriving on the Fediverse - I'm missing out on the niche communities
While larger, more general communities are thriving on the Fediverse - I'm missing out on the niche communities
Gaming, news, tech, general literature. All of these are somewhat thriving, with a steady influx of posts and comments. At the same time, the userbase is sorely lacking for more niche communities. In my case it'd be stuff like poetry, yoga, religion, linguistics, meditation. Or many other communities I'd doubt they'd form a larger userbase here, at least to the degree that it'd foster good discussions. Communities where there are a larger amount of "normal people", that are not tech-aware, and who have no interest in migrating off centralized corporate solutions. That just want a large space to discuss what they're interested in.
This for me at least, makes it hard to completely leave reddit (or even Facebook and their groups!). Do you think the fediverse will ever reach the point where this would become a non-issue?
Working on it! Right now, with this huge influx of new users, is a great time to create content that is very search engine friendly. In an effort to promote such content, I started the dance community here on kbin. Please join!
I noticed there didn't exist a niche community that I'm passionate about so... I created it! It's like any other new platform, it just takes time.
The fediverse grows in waves. This was the first wave for the threadiverse, not The Big Wave. Nows the time to let the lead devs catch their breath, prepare for larger userbase and contributor base, and work on critical issues and let contributors start to polish UX issues. The next time there's a wave, this will be a much better place and we'll be ready. That's when you'll start to see a lot more niche communities able to sustain themselves
While lots of people are suggesting creating communities for your niche interests, I think it's even more important to to find niche communities that others have created and contribute to them. Obviously you can do both, but if you've got limited time to post it may be better to focus your efforts, and be the "first follower" rather than the leader.
I've been doing this for /m/Animemes and /m/anime_irl, just making one post per day in each. There hasn't been a ton of other activity yet, but the subscriber counts have been growing steadily, so we'll get there.
I've also been wanting to build up /m/Bitcoin in the same way, but I don't feel like I've got much to contribute right now, so I'm focusing on the anime communities.
I was part of the Linguistics subreddit, but I don't feel qualified to open a kbin magazine or lemmy community for it. While I did have linguistics as my major in university, I had to quit after getting my bachelor's credits but before finishing my thesis (due to depression).
I edited loads of my old comments to suggest people join kbin, but it seems the mods of /r/linguistics hate that. They were all removed with no exceptions.
I know my community will take many months or even years to thrive on the Fediverse. It took 3-4 years to gain good momentum on Reddit and only in the last year did more users start posting on the sub
But I will continue posting even for the 5-10 people that may read them right now. It's the only way forward
I commiserate with you on this. I miss my crochet and knitting communities from reddit, but I did make the severance anyway. I also don't use my Facebook account at all, so I don't have an online fiber arts community anywhere.
I belong to a small social knitting group, but I'm the most advanced knitter there, so I don't feel like I have any outlets for finding and appreciating master knitters other than YouTube. But I only turn to YouTube for tutorials/entertainment, not for a sense of community.
I think those will come in time. We just need the volume, and also some time to polish (e.g. improvements to the web interface, official apps released for kbin, etc). A lot of tech folks are streaming in but with more polish those who are non-technically inclined will join in as well.
If you build a linguistics magazine I will join :) I think the thing to do is pick the subject you're most passionate about/ most knowledgable about and create a magazine for it. Post things regularly and people will start to notice it. That's what I've done! https://kbin.social/m/Otomegames (@Otomegames@kbin.social for my federated gals)
there's tons of niche mags around, but when i go to them, no one is participating. we have to help grow them if we want them to thrive. i try to post in them if I see they are empty. we cant expect them to magically appear and grow, we must be proactive
Yeah it's going to be a process. For an example, the Gundam and Gunpla communities are relatively niche compared to other anime or model kit building (which are already niche things in of themselves) and while their subreddits are quite active, we still don't have that critical mass (or much mass at all) of posts and content to engage with here. I have been meaning to, and plan on, making more posts to those so they get more activity.
The issue everyone is facing right now is we are expecting to immediately shift to a ready made alternative for Reddit in less than 2 weeks.
I mean Reddit happened over a course of 15 years. At least. Expecting to replicate the same diversity and engagements within 2 weeks is too much.
Right now the community is in 'move house' mode with lots of activity and excitement. It will all come to a calm once the shift is complete and we are all in our new home.
Then in the next few days... We will start hanging pictures and arranging the countertops(aka adding niche subs and improving engagements).
For what it's worth, this is exactly how Reddit was in the early days. I remember a niche sub being something that had maybe 30-50 members, now basically every subject has a subreddit with communities in the 5000+ range.
Just give it time. If there is a particular community you're missing, use this as an opportunity to start it over here and start getting people involved.
I just feel like as we get new users. These communities will start to pop up more. The great dig migration didn’t happen overnight. Well, it did, but the community still took time to grow. We can do the same thing here.
The instances of the fediverse are necessarily smaller than the reddit server, therefore you will have to search for remote communities on specialized servers. Or start your own.
If meditation concerns 0.1% of the population, then you will need 10000 accounts for each 10 meditation members, that would be 40 people on kbin. So you have to search on different instances, and maybe move to a different federation. Your main instance should be located where you live and then you search elsewhere for your niche interests.
My recommendation: Make the ones you care about the msot yourself :)
Interested in generative art? (Meaning art created computationally, not really AI art but art created using code)
If so all are welcome to join our feldgling niche community at kbin.social/m/genart
I miss bakingfails and the nail polish community :/
Come joing us over on https://kbin.social/m/benignexistence :) It's quiet out there.
I found one of my fave communities on kbin, and it wasn’t active. So I am posting and checking for new posts every day to help it grow. I understand how you feel, but if you want it to happen you should try to be the change.
@Treedrake We can create magazines like this one.
I created a home theater magazine (I think). Feel free to post there!
Slowly trying to figure this site out!
I created a place for model trains: @modeltrains / !modeltrains@kbin.social (on Lemmy, if that link doesn't work you should use the search button by your username to look up
https://kbin.social/m/modeltrains).Bro, the boom is still under way, be patient.
Congratulations! You get to help found those niche communities in a new place!
I feel like the niche communities will come with time, so I'm not super worried outside of what happens to one specific writing community's audience, which matters a lot if you're a writer trying to build an audience, particularly if you don't want to wait a few years for the community you're been writing a book for to grow again.
What I'm really missing is the ability to browse /r/all, which will undoubtedly be harder with Lemmy/Kbin. Having something that can aggregate those well is going to be super important for federated communities to snowball together.
It'd be nice if someone made an html-based scrapper to get the recent top posts from reddit and copy them here
When I joined Kbin I created the communities I was most active in. Someone created my favorite community just before I did, so I instead requested to be added as a mod and I am now the most active poster there. I am the author of most of the posts there, and the number of subscribers is growing slowly but steadily. I think we just have to do what what's needed to make this the place we want it to be. A lot of us are going to have to go from lurkers to moderators, from occasional users to prolific posters. Things have to start somewhere. If we all just wait until someone else does what we expect, then we're all just stay waiting and nothing is going to happen.
There are some niche communities on fediverse, speaking as primarily a Mastodon.art user. The hashtag system exists as a way of making a toot available for search, as most fediverse platforms don't have full text search. Hashtags essentially work like twitter hashtags but better.
Fediverse is better suited to niche communities, anyways. Feel free to make your own instance, but remember that running an instance is a huge responsibility: You have to suspend the bad actors, ban people who post hate speech, and generally ensure that your instance is running well. Admin work is psychologically stressful; just ask any of the reddit mods who quit over the API changes making their job impossible.
Join us at kbin.social/m/Battletech
We need a technical backend and all my technical subs. IT, Python, Unreal Engine, Unity3D,
There is the Fediverse, and there is kbin.social. I'm not even sure how to see what niche communities are out in the Fediverse. You'd have to go through each instance to see what magazines/communities (these are referred to differently in different places) exist out there. Is there a or could there be a directory of sorts to list your magazine/community so that others can find it?
I feel confident in saying we should not be planning to host every single community on kbin.social.
Redifugee here. I got here and created a community for Santa Fe, NM, USA (@SantaFe ), and another for Photobiomodulation/ Red Light Therapy (@photobiomodulation ). LoL, it's ain't much, but it's honest work.
It took a long time for niche communities to pop up on Reddit too, remember Reddit has been around a long time now. Back in the day, Digg was the shiznit and nobody knew about Reddit.
I support the Fediverse but here is one of its problems that needs to be negotiated.
As an individual poster, if an instance bans you or defederates instances that you would like to communicate with, you can wander off to another instance. It's bad, but it's not the worst.
As a (prospective) moderator, you have to recognize the danger that an overactive instance admin will crack down on your sub or remove you as a moderator for editorial reasons.
Reddit is pretty slimy, but for years they were broadly hands-off from a moderator perspective. Reddit's recent actions show that a moderator can put decades of sweat equity into building and maintaining a community - and then get shut out capriciously, without communications channels or other tools to migrate any significant portion of that community. Start over from scratch.
The question for a prospective moderator is whether you can really trust the instance you're basing your new mag on. Most communities of any size will want insurance of having an instance they control or at least an instance that makes fairly strong assurances about moderator ownership.
If you're just driving by and you want to own the espresso machine universe on a particular instance, you can create /m/EspressoMachines and arbitrarily name a few other moderators and then wander off, but this kind of moderator is doing very little to grow or maintain the community. It's arguably irrational to commit to that kind of labor when the rug is likely to be pulled out from under you at any time.
If you help them , contact them, we can get them over.
Same here. As frustrated as I've been with Reddit for years now, what kept me there was that it was really the only place to get tailored news and discussions on my special interests. I'm still not gonna go back to reddit, but I don't know what I do instead.
I tried to set up a few magazines myself, but it's pretty clear there aren't enough people on this platform for me to find anyone who shares common interests on the things I want to talk about.
Feel like I'm just gonna be a hermit out in the mountains out of the loop on everything.
To help deal with the existential dread, at least half of my Reddit subs were various cat subs, as well as subs for other cute animals, and I long for the day that I can get there again.