I do, but as more people join I’m also feeling a little republican - i got my spot and this is good; everyone on the outside can go fuck off now. I don’t want it to get so big that it’s what we left. No intended disrespect or lack of acknowledgment to those who were here before.
Honestly no, I was mostly subscribed to smaller subs, and only the general communities here really have a critical mass. I’m definitely interacting more with general communities, but I really miss communities around niche interests.
I have hope that they will be here with time, but for now there’s a bunch of empty communities with no posts and a mod who has never posted anything anywhere, just made a few dozen communities with the names of popular subreddits, and even many the communities that aren’t in that situation have 3-4 posts and a couple dozen subscribers
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Yeah everything feels so raw still. But I don’t mind it yet. I pretty much learn something new every 6 hours or so because of all the content that’s getting added to the big instances. It’s been an exciting honeymoon period.
This is exactly my main gripe with Lemmy. I mostly spent my time on reddit browsing subs about quite specific hobbies, didn’t care for r/funny or r/pics which is what Lemmy currently feels like to me
What are your niche communities you are looking for? I got lucky that a bunch of mine are semi migrated (3dprinting, houseplants, ergomechboards, etc)
Cosplay is one example. There’s a handful of NSFW ‘cosplay’ communities, one not-very-active one on blahaj, and one squatted on .world by a user who is also squatting a whole bunch of clearly NSFW communities and has never posted or commented anything anywhere, and named themselves “@Moderator.” Laser cutting, Inkscape, some book fandoms are examples I was (and to some extent am) actively engaged with on Reddit where communities exist, but are far from a critical mass.
I feel your pain about the squatted communities and agree that I wish there was a good laser cutting one. I know a lot of people are frustrated with the squatting so hopefully the lemmy.world admins implement some sort of community request.
I don’t know how we fix the absentee mod problem either. Sure you can create the community on a C new instance, but then it’s even less likely to be successful. I Lemmy is on and I’ll never go back to Reddit, but I don’t see anything replacing it 1:1 the way Lemmy is trying to. It took Reddit a decade to mature in regards to niche communities. Lemmy has a ton of barriers already such as the roadblocks put up by absentee mods and the difficulty in finding communities at all. Lemmy’s All feed seems to bury new communities even worse than Reddit does, but that’s just an unscientific impression.
One suggestion I saw was auto-deleting communities that are still empty after a week, incentivizing new mods to upload something, not just squat names that were popular subs in hopes of I guess having some sort of power if they pick up?
that doesn’t sound like a good reasoning to me. how much power can a lemmy moderator have? not much. having a big community on a platform like this is more responsibility than benefit.
most communities were simply built so that people would have spaces to post at first. think of it like helping build infrastructure. when this community was created, for instance, the default lemmy.world community was basically the only active one around. then this one popped up along with many others, and people supported what served their current interests best; others stayed inactive. Most mods will still respond to requests even if a space is empty, afaik.
I’m not saying there are no good reasons to make a community without posting, but when that’s all a user has ever done, and they’ve done it dozens of times, I have a hard time assuming they’re just trying to help the fediverse thrive.
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Presumably worth reaching out to the instance admin if a mod is squatting on a community name on that instance.
Might even be worth just messaging that mod too - they might have taken a ‘build it and they will come’ stance and would welcome another hand to mod and post.
question: can instance admins remove/change mods of a community?
Lemmy.ml has c/Community_Requests and I think it’s about time we had that on .world too.
That’s one alternative that would allow people to request a community exists without just making an empty community, and leave it to people who want to participate and actively moderate to create them
Same here and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I was definitely on Reddit an unhealthy amount so I’m hoping I can cut down my online time and use something that’s a better alternative. And we don’t need to act like everything here is instantly better. We’re here for a reason and there are definitely things that are better but we’ve also lost over a decade of material and rhythm that will take time to build up and make the place even close to as vibrant as Reddit was in its heyday.
Also no for me. I spent most of my time reading the comment threads, and liked the arguments and “discussion”. It was probably more an addiction than enjoyment though. I spent most of my time on bestofupdates and relationship_advice, and the comment section of politics and news
I miss my old forums from the wild west days of the internet before facebook reddit and the rest took over.
Besides the novelty accounts like shittymorph and the rest, can you name a single user you interacted with regularly on reddit? I used to be friends, real actual honest to god friends, with a bunch of people I met on forums. We’d interact on the forums, AIM, games, and meet up now and then. True digital community. Reddit was too anonymous and wasn’t conducive to repeated interaction with each other.
I miss AIM and forums, bygone era