I think the rush to recreate communities is a bad idea.

If you recall reddits growth many of their communities evolved as offshoots of a single generic community. This made it easier for people to see discussions they normally would not get involved in, and once the posts in a similar category reached critical mass it moved to a sub Reddit.

I think people are recreating their niche communities here but they are floundering since the user base is still pretty small. Maybe it’s best to post to the “big” communities until the time is right to move to smaller, targeted communities?

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

I agree - there are plenty of empty magazines setup as subreddit clones. What we really need is a push encouraging content and comment submissions more than anything else. That's what's going to drive the development of a vibrant community on kbin.social.

Generally, unless you have at least 20 pieces of content from multiple users with active commentary, most folks will assume it's a dead community and move on to a bigger community on lemmy.world or similar to find more content. One thing I would suggest for the moderators of growing communities is to always comment on, upvote and boost your contributors' submissions in the beginning stages of community growth. Your personal engagement of the content is the first step in encouraging your readers to do the same.

That being said, I'd love for folks to create more new niche communities that didn't exist on Reddit. There's a lot more freedom here - we should take advantage of it.

Pandantic,
Pandantic avatar

I’m a poster on a small magazine and I upvote and boost all posted content. Also, lurkers of small magazines need to just put some content out there! Put you’re voice in! I can almost guarantee you will be well received if it’s relevant and on topic.

some_guy,
some_guy avatar

Asking lurkers to be content creators/providers is a losing game. Your community is fighting for their attention, not the other way around.

Pandantic,
Pandantic avatar

It really just depends. I was a lurker (and occasionally commented) in a couple of Pokemon TCG groups on Reddit and I never felt a need to contribute because there was so much content already. I now create posts and comment because I recognize the magazine needs content to thrive. If there are others out there who are the same as me, and want the community to thrive, I don’t think asking them to make content if they can is too much. It’s not anyone is requiring it, but it’s a way to build and give back to your community. And it’s not too hard to do on a Pokémon TCG community, though I can see how it might be difficult on others such as a tech news magazine.

Bozicus,

This is definitely a thing. I don’t like making a comment or post that has already been made 80 times, and I’m used to that being the case. Once I get used to the fact that I might be the first one to post something (and possibly the only one who wants to, lol), I will probably get used to posting regularly.

Eggyhead,
Eggyhead avatar

I made a magazine on kbin as an alternative to a relatively niche subreddit I really appreciated. And in the month since the migration, it’s only grown more apparent that I was a bit over enthusiastic about the scope of that migration. Only 2, maybe 3, others have contributed to the magazine, and it’s usually a question I have no definitive answer for. Oddly enough, there are over 40 silent subscribers, so I’m probably doing something of interest to some people out there.

For better or worse, Kbin still doesn’t have the means to let you remove magazines you’ve created. So rather than deleting or abandoning it, I’ve kind of opted to take responsibility over it and treat it as more of a personal hobby and public repository for myself. Every once in a while I’ll post a tutorial for something I’ve done, or write out some thoughts of my own without any expectation of engagement. When the ability to delete magazines comes through, I might consider migrating my more useful contributions to one of the more centralized magazines at that point and then removing my own.

007v2,

I will join plenty of niche groups, not because I have a specific interest in it myself but I enjoy seeing what others who do enjoy it have to say.

I myself have nothing to contribute but like seeing other peoples interest, not sure if that makes sense!

metaStatic,

I would go bankrupt perusing half of my interests but I love to watch other people spend money.

thingsiplay,
thingsiplay avatar

@Eggyhead Does have Kbin the ability to give ownership of a magazine to someone else?

Eggyhead,
Eggyhead avatar

As far as I’m aware, not ownership. You can bring in additional mods now, I think…

HughJanus,

Oddly enough, there are over 40 silent subscribers, so I’m probably doing something of interest to some people out there.

That’s not really odd. Actual contributors make up about 0.01% of the userbase. I mod a community of about 12k users and it gets maybe 2-3 posts/day with maybe 4-5 comments.

IninewCrow,
IninewCrow avatar

I was a mod of a small niche reddit sub for about six years. When I started working on it, there were only about 200 subscribers and it was a pretty quiet place. Over the time I managed it, I had to work the group to get them interested. I'd regularly post, comment and like whatever was happening. But at the same time, I'd do searches throughout reddit to look for like minded people and just let them know my sub existed. No big marketing push but just a little reminder that my sub existed. I'd set out private messages to people and connect with them .. about half wouldn't respond .. a quarter would say they weren't interested but about a quarter would say thanks and that they weren't aware of the sub and would have a look.

After doing that for four or five years, I grew the sub from 200 members to 2,000.

I also learned that on any social media about 90 percent of users are just lurkers who like reading stuff, liking stuff and maybe once in a while commenting. It's only about ten percent of the group that are active, comment, post new content or even create new content. The larger your group, the larger that ten percent becomes and the more content your group generates and the more activity happens.

Keep working it ... it's all up to you in the early stages, you have to put in the work to contact people, encourage them to join and talk and chat with your base to keep them engaged. You create the content or highlight new stuff or keep posting content you find and share to your group .. all your users are there ... they are the 90 percent, you are the ten percent right now.

As your group grows, eventually there will be one or two people that will be enthusiastic and they will help with content ... then as the activity grows, there will be a few more active users who will post and comment regularly.

Your group will never suddenly one day jump to 10,000 users and your community becomes a hive of activity ... it grows organically like a plant in your garden. Right now it is small and fragile and anything can bring it down ... you not tending to it will mean it dies. But if you water it, tend to it, look after it eventually it will grow into something big and there will be many people that will come around to help you with this enormous garden or field of crops that have sprouted from your activity.

NightOwl, (edited )

What beehaw has done with limiting the creation of communities has worked well, since the ones they created have been pretty active.

Not all instances need to be that strict, but might be good to have a place to propose a community, why they’d be a good mod, and type of initial content they plan to post themselves before it grows would help until the user base is bigger to be able to sustain random free for all creation of communities. Some places just exist with nothing posted at all, so you’re not sure if even the person who created abandoned it from the get go.

14th_cylon,

Some places just exist with nothing posted at all, so you’re not sure if even the person who created abandoned it from the get go.

even more absurd are these communities where someone invested lot of work into creating the sidebar, created rules that resembles constitution for mid-size country and there is zero posts, not even from that founder.

sometimes it really seems like “i proclaimed myself a king, the subjects surely should come now, right?”

PabloDiscobar, (edited )
PabloDiscobar avatar

This uncontrolled rush killed magazines. For example /m/hardware. I wanted to start something, but it was already reserved by someone who never posted anything in a month, not a post, not a comment anywhere. There is no link to other mags on the page, no rules, no nothing.

I messaged the guy to get the magazine back but never got any answer.

Catch42,
Catch42 avatar

Why not try starting a magazine with a very similar name? I think the magazines are case sensitive so maybe m/Hardware

PabloDiscobar,
PabloDiscobar avatar

The name hardware was kind of a "catch all" to answer generic questions and to give exposition to other smaller niche magazines like monitors, memory, ssd, motherboards, datahoarders, homelab, you name it. Calling it something else would have defeated the purpose.

e_t_,

You might go with PC hardware. Just "hardware" could refer also to nuts, screws, and door hinges.

PabloDiscobar,
PabloDiscobar avatar

No one will type pchardware. But we could have added links to other non-IT magazines.

Pandantic,
Pandantic avatar

But on searches, if they type hardware, PCHardware will pop up because it has hardware in it.

Obi,
@Obi@sopuli.xyz avatar

In cases like this I think you should ask the instance admins to reassign it to you.

Catch42,
Catch42 avatar

I think that's true for some niche topics, but other ones are better served by having dedicated communities from the start.

When I joined I made 2 magazines. One of them was about collecting Nintendo games and I quickly realized that I would have better discussions if I just joined the Nintendo magazine. I've basically abandoned it. The other I made, m/Otomegames I think is needed. We could post in the general gaming magazines, but there's a whole bunch conventions and inside jokes that people who don't play otome games wouldn't understand.

Now for my shameless plug: do you like otome games? Do you not know what otome games are, but romance/adventure games made for women sounds intriguing? Come join us <- direct link. "@Otomegames @kbin.social" <- remove the space for federated peeps

Elevator7009,

Oh hi, didn’t expect to see you here!

Have been trying to post content in @Otomegames to make it active. It’s pretty niche though. Thriving and healthy Reddit community whose rules about advertising other communities are making it very hard to move them over here :(

Catch42,
Catch42 avatar

Hi, thank you for your contributions!

I find myself wondering how many people we need to have a self-sustaining community. I've been making and stockpiling memes and discussion ideas so I can post regularly, but ideally there'd be enough people so that my posts aren't the majority.

Candelestine,

I mean, you’re right, but it’s pretty inevitable. There will be a natural wave of creations, inactivity and reclaimings that will take place over the coming couple of years.

For now though, this is wild west internet, so trying to control it would be similar to trying to herd cats with firecrackers.

traxen,

That statement about herding cats will stay with me for a bit.

/Lights a cracker

dreikelvin,

I’ve seen this exact same post on Voat years ago. Shortly before voat/r/news was taken over by right-wing activists…but that’s another (comical) story…Copying is just the first step and it is a natural process. If you didn’t want to be like Reddit, you wouldn’t use a voting process and subs either. I actually like seeing all the subs here that I am used to on Reddit. It makes the transition smoother. What happens after that is open to the stars

daruksrevenge,

I’ve already noticed this with some of the Lemmy versions of the Niche Subreddits I was a part of.

One thing I do hope for is for one version of said community and didn’t exactly get why there were multiple.

Example: NYC and New York City, why not just one or the other? Now there is a subreddit for each borough which as stated above, makes sense.

thingsiplay,
thingsiplay avatar

@Brkdncr Beehaw is doing it exactly like that.

HipPriest,

From a user point of view there's definitely that initial rush of 'wow, this group looks great!' to scanning across to see 0 posts, 0 comments, 0 users access feeling sad...

That's not too say that these should necessarily be removed but it's a lot harder to get people in to niche communities. Unless you outright went into the Reddit equivalent and said politely you were trying to start one here. But they'd probably be happy in Reddit by this stage so...

Bozicus,

This might actually be a good time to invite people from Reddit, while the new unpopular decisions are still fresh in people’s minds…

Pandantic,
Pandantic avatar

I did this while the whole API thing was happening and only a couple people liked and joined, and one user said “what’s going on with Reddit?”

Bozicus,

Tough crowd, I guess. :-(. But you did have a couple people join, which is a couple people more than would have joined before. That’s not zero.

We’re all used to these massive platforms with 9-digit numbers of users, but there’s no need to be that big for everyone to have a good experience. I doubt anyone on Reddit regularly interacted with more than a tiny fraction of the total userbase, even if they hung out in the big subs.

Pandantic,
Pandantic avatar

Yeah, but the sub I made a replacement for was small and specialized, but the super low numbers here don’t really facilitate a good community because most of the content was people telling their stories. I’m not running back to Reddit by any means, but I do miss that community (r/Narcolepsy if anyone’s curious).

Bozicus,

That’s definitely a case where absolute numbers matter, yeah. I miss the shared-experience subs most, too, though there’s a surprising amount of stuff here already. You might try posting about narcolepsy in some of the broader health [or whatever category you’d put it in] communities, and see who’s there. That’s the kind of thing people might not expect to find at all at this point.

But I think a lot of people are talking about hobby communities, which can be made active by either a large number of people who post rarely, or a smaller number who post frequently, without having to change the overall content very much (I think a lot of people who share any projects could share more projects than they do). The number of people required for “critical mass “ in a forum is a lot lower than people think, and also, a lot more affected by who the people are, and the climate of the community. It’s something I (and I’m sure many others) remember from before massive platforms existed, but apparently it is not obvious to people who didn’t see it. Different experiences, different internet, but I think the essential desire for community is the same, and small communities can flourish in the same way.

NekoKamiGuru,

One thing we need to break into a billion tiny dust like pieces is the idea of “Super Moderators” who control hundreds of different boards . This idea lead to the group think that infected Reddit , because when a “Super Moderator” succumbs being prejudiced then it can effect the entire site , either directly on sites the now abusive “Super Moderator” deletes all posts that challenge their prejudices , or indirectly via a chilling effect when the abusive “Super Moderator” bans people from ALL of the subreddits they control, just for interacting with subreddits they disagree with , regardless of the content of those interactions , and with zero hope for appeal since any attempt at communication will be met with silence and a mute.

NekoKamiGuru,

Yes I am all for the idea of opposing hateful groups , but adopting their tactics and becoming just as hateful is not the way to accomplish this.

Catch42,
Catch42 avatar

Forgot to switch to your alt?

livus,
livus avatar

I think it's more likely @NekoKamiGuru responded in the wrong place. The above doesn't really make sense as a reply to their other comment.

shepherd,
shepherd avatar

The fediverse should be more resistant to this (I hope). The people in charge of instances are pretty comparable to super moderators since they both can control a lot of internet real estate. The fediverse's response to bad instance owners is to just switch to an instance that's run in a way that you like better. Or even better, make a new instance that's less bad!

If there's an instance with a problem super moderator, then the same solution should work right? Go elsewhere, or make a new magazine. If there's a single problem user dominating all communities in multiple instances, well. Time to start "@free.folk" or whatever lmao.

waterbogan,

You could be right, there’s a few here that are still pretty dead, I have tried to inject a bit of life into a few of my favourites but the patients are still unresponsive. That said, its good to have readymade replacements already up and running if/when the clowns running reddit make another catastrophically bad decision that pisses off even more of their userbase.

What does need to happen is a cleaning up of all the duplicates - there are two Swimming comunities and two Idiotsincars for instance. The Android community mods did the right and honourable thing by merging with another Android community on a tech focused instance, others should be encourage to do the same

brickfrog,

Yeah you’re right, there are already a ton of duplicate & niche communities spread across different Lemmy/Kbin instances. It’s strange when someone decides to go create yet another niche community in another instance when there’s plenty of others on the same topic with barely any activity of their own.

I’m also seeing a lot of accounts creating communities without doing anything else afterwards. Communities won’t succeed if the creators/moderators have no interest in posting anything or even updating their own sidebar description.

EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted,
@EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

This makes a lot of sense, imo.

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