I love the “cassette-futurism” aesthetic / niche, but hadn’t really thought about it for some time, until I hit up our FV community just now, and submitted a little article about an item I found, yesterday.
Problem? I happened to notice that in that /c, the prior posts dated to 2mos ago, and that currently, the place is effectively dormant, if not outright dead. This to me is a right-old shame, given that 200+ posts had been made there already, meaning to me that a sincere & sustained effort had been made to launch it and keep it going for a quite a while, until… well. Whatever happened.
Just in general, though-- I would think that anyone who’s been a part of the Fediverse for a while has noticed the heavy trend of communities being created all the time, with most of them crashing and burning relatively shortly thereafter. Or others, persisting for a while, until the creators or contributors dried up at some point.
Still, at the end of the day, the FV is full of dead communities that succumbed for one reason or another, and that’s unfortunately just sort of… natural, right? That said, I do not like it when it happens to concepts and communities that I love and support!
So what’s my point, here?
Er… well… I was thinking that maybe as a group-effort, some of us might-potentially rotate our posts a bit between communities that we wanted to support, to help keep them going?
Obviously that would need to be cross-organised in terms of groups of people and groups of communities, but I’m wondering if maybe that might help in such situations? For example, let’s say that every week I create 1-3 posts for a rotating schedule of critical communities I appreciate, so to speak. And others in the sign-up list do the same, see? In which case we together help keep those communities going on until they potentially ‘catch fire’ in a larger, self-sustaining sense, so to speak. Or something like that?
Not sure if all that makes sense, but… there it is.
The issue is, people keep trying to treat this space like Reddit, a website with multiple orders of magnitude more users than the entire Fediverse.
We need to grow things out in a more controlled manner. Broader topic spaces that can house discussions of of families of niche topics. Themed servers.
Meaningful attempts to advertise these spaces outside of fedi, to people who are interested. And that means selling them on something other than “Lemmy”, because “Lemmy” isn’t a selling point to basically anybody.
I often wonder what it would’ve been like if Lemmy had limited/restricted the creation of communities for the first few years. That’s what Reddit did until they grew.
Maybe it could’ve been like 10 to 20 communities per instance at maximum. Might’ve spread things out across instances more too.
[email protected] Yeah. Controlled growth is important when you’re trying to grow a forum. Especially when you’re trying to grow a forum that is aping someone else’s UX (and doing it kind of poorly). But, of course, there’s an option in the server settings to limit who can create new communities, and seemingly no site admins have chosen to use it.
But the other thing is just… you can’t advertise “Lemmy”. This has been the problem with everything on the Fediverse. Everyone is trying to sell the server software as the experience. It’s like trying to get people to your blog or whatever by selling them on “Wordpress”.
A bit of a unique case, but Beehaw disabled community creation.
It would probably have been better indeed
This is the way. Niche subs weren’t created out of the blue. Early reddit had a handful of subreddits, mainly programming, technology, pics, and some others. It took a good many years of user growth before things like r/bedsidestoriesitellmyselfbeforetakingapythonexam could ever have a chance of having a thriving community. I see so many communities on here that only have a single poster or bot chugging away. Another issue is users gatekeeping communities on here. I often see people complain on posts in technology that are inherently political (like VPN banning/age verification laws/AI fuckery) that the community is not meant for politics.
honestly I like piefeds solution to this particular problem more; communities get grouped into broader feeds then if there’s anything in there you don’t like you can block it easily enough.