While larger, more general communities are thriving on the Fediverse - I'm missing out on the niche communities

Treedrake@kbin.social to Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 291 points –

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?

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It just takes time for these communities to form.

On top of that, we can't expect communities to POOF into existence.

We have to be part of them to build them, which means making them if they don't exist yet as well as posting and commenting in the ones that do exist. I hope that people who are used to lurking on Reddit will go out of their comfort zone a bit and start to participate in fediverse communities so that we can build things up more quickly.

Yea I was a prolific commenter but I think I only created maybe 6-8 posts in 14 years on reddit, and certainly never created a community. So I might have to step up. Regardless of reddit, I absolutely love the idea of the fediverse and the decentralized nature of it, so I really would like to see it succeed. It really does have to be the way forward on the internet to avoid corporate interests.

Same here. The voice in the back of my head says "be the change you want to see in the world", then I'm like "nah that's too much work"...

Yeah! I mean, of course it's nobody's job or obligation or anything, but if we want this place to pop off we gotta put something into it. :)

Same. I think we need some way to coordinate the initial burst of content for some of the smaller subs. I hate to say it, but maybe we need to assign "homework" - Request (not require) new subscribers to contribute unique stories or info relevant to the mag/comm on some type of schedule.

Something like:
"As we try to grow this new community, we want to hear from you. We're asking (not requiring) all new subscribers to start a new post within their first week covering some aspect of the topic they find personally interesting or that they feel could help others. Just add "(1P)" to the title of the post. It doesn't matter if it's something you said elsewhere, if you're new to the entire topic and just want to post a bunch of questions, you have a funny story to tell, or have a super niche specialty.

Also, we should consider having more moderator-level users in subs to reduce the burden of moderation. It's more daunting if you're asked to be one of 3 mods than it is to be one of 15. We should also look into incentivizing moderation duties, but there's probably a much longer discussion to be had about that.

This sounds like a great tradition to encourage and support. On Reddit I was pretty danged chatty & responsive, but almost never started my own post. Maybe at most once a year. I hereby commit to upping my participation game to include some actual posts to some of the quiet magazines I've subbed to. Thanks for the push.

And YOUR exuberance has inspired me to commit to upping my post game. I was never a big poster on Reddit, but mostly because I just didn't want to deal with the contrarian and amateur professionals fallout. It might be best to focus on the niche communities, since that's where the real valuable stuff exists on Reddit.

Good luck out there!

What is the consensus on the etiquette of creating new communities/magazines with the names of the still extant old subreddits (particularly when you're not a mod of the old subreddit)?

I've seen some magazines put a note in their description that the owner is willing to hand it off to the mod team of the corresponding subreddit. I think that's a decent compromise in order to welcome the old subreddit to migrate over and maintain continuity, while also not waiting around for other people to act.

I would suggest using great care in accepting new mods coming from Reddit. Do look at their history with their community and what they shaped the community into.

Well, yes. Obviously only do this if you thought the mods were doing a good job with that subreddit. :)

There are existing communities and there is an exodus, so it shouldn't be necessary for the entire process to repeat from scratch.

From culture perspective, sure... But content don't generate itself.

I was on Reddit for over 10 years and it only became a place for niche communities when they got rid of defaults. Kbin/Fediverse will get there in a few years.

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!

https://kbin.social/m/dance

I created a couple of communities that I used to post to on Reddit:

Industrial Design and Jewelry Design

I’ve been working in both fields for years and I’d like to help build up these communities within the Fediverse.

Whether you’re a designer working in one of those areas, or are simply interested in them, feel free to 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.

I really want to take this attitude but I just don’t have time to become a moderator.

My hope is once a community has built up enough that I can dump the mod powers on someone else.

I’m not mad at that. I’ll probably hold off until there are decent mod tools then start seeding some niche places.

why do you doubt it? there are thousands of new people flooding in daily. set up the mags and post for engagement? sounds like a lot of work but I understand what you're missing, my communities are not here either, but I'm going to do my best to make a space for them.

Just because it'd require a larger momentum than what we have now. But yes, I've been trying to contribute as well, so I'm trying to not sit idly by. I might just be a tad pessimistic, even though I like what we're all trying to do.

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.

Yeah, keeping the content flowing will be the most important thing, and it's much less daunting than taking on moderator duties. Everyone on Kbin/Lemmy right now is basically an early adopter, so they might need to take more responsibility to keep momentum up. It's too much to ask people who usually just read news on their niche subreddits to suddenly start up their own community here, but everyone can take one step "up the ladder" so to speak, and we're already seeing this to some extent I think. Lurkers trying their best to be commenters, commenters putting up their own posts and regular posters starting their own communities.

I've been pretty disappointed with the DnD community so far. So I've been trying to post a lot about the new playtest material in a magazine I want to grow. So far it's like 5 of posting often but I hope the engagement will bring more

I think what you're doing so far is key. And it's really the hard part. The rest is just being a friendly place.

No one wants to be one of those 5 people howling into the void when something is getting started, but it needs to be done to demonstrate that people are willing to participate. You might also consider posting easy polls or open ended questions to invite engagement. (If you haven't)

this is my mindset. its gonna take some of us to kick things off. i do it in my mags where im the main one posting

I just came across https://ttrpg.network/, a Lemmy instance that's specialized toward tabletop roleplaying games. Haven't explored it much but I suspect we'll be seeing this pattern more in the future - whole instances devoted to a particular topic, with the specialized subgenres being communities on there.

That's is where I have been posting mostly. The startrek one has been amazing

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.

You could always start a community here now, and hand it over when the right person comes along. In the mean time the one you make now might be the perfect place for your comments.

I figure there must be an admin among the mods of that sub.

That’s exactly what I’m trying to do for all the communities I want. I’m starting them, making some placeholder rules, letting them attract a community, then I’m going to have the community vote on permanent rules, and then, once all of that is in place to keep the community stable, recruit mods to take over. At that point, it’ll be clear which users would make good mods (I hope)

This post is helpful for highlighting some of the reasons the migration is slow. People who want to chart the future of the Fediverse need to listen to this kind of feedback and think about how to fix the pipeline.

Hi there. I wasn't in the linguistic community in Reddit, but I am a linguist and I would be willing to create one here and moderate it. Linguistics is very broad. What were the topics discussed in the reddit community? I am a psycholingusit, so the focus of my contributions would be mostly in that field, and I imagine mostly scholarly content being shared and discussed, but I would like to know what someone like you, who used to be a member, would expect from such a community.

EDIT: There's already one! : https://kbin.social/m/linguistics

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.

https://kbin.social/m/knitting Enjoy

@HandsHurtLoL (lmfao at the fitting username)

I'm sure neither of you will mind if I plug crochet@lemmy.ca here as well. It seems they're finally beginning to work out their federating problems again and I've only not posted yet because I haven't quite finished my projects yet. Like you, I'm sorely missing it, but that's just gonna make me contribute all I can

I love that you get the reference in my username LOL

I am subbed to all the crochet magazines/communities that are federated with kbin, but now that I've replied to someone else it dawns on me that the real issue is that those communities participate via the microblog and not via threads. This is probably a major reason why I'm not seeing those communities as active.

I wonder if there isn't a way to get microblog content to appear on my front page along with new threads.

I am subbed to this already. This community almost exclusively participates via microblog, not threads, so none of their content comes to my front page. I can't change that that community operates that way. I don't care (yet) for the microblog portion of the Fediverse.

I'm subbed to every knitting community federated with kbin.

https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/122599/While-larger-more-general-communities-are-thriving-on-the-Fediverse#entry-comment-479872

https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/122599/While-larger-more-general-communities-are-thriving-on-the-Fediverse#entry-comment-479569

I hope those comment links work. They suggest creating your own niche magazine, nurturing it through the early stages, then handing over mod duties to others who might be more comfortable in the role.

I saw that someone did that here with my favorite sub. I made a post just to show that there is interest in the topic and to hopefully invite more engagement.

Because I'm primarily a mobile user with a non-tech 9-to-5 job, I feel totally ill equipped to follow through with this, but I do hope more people feel empowered to go this route!

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

Yeah I feel I have to do the same. I also created a community for my niche hobby and I found I have to be a bit more of a poster than I used to be, even if it means that for now the magazine is mostly me and pics of my garden.

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.

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

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)

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.

Care minding linking those communities? I love Gundam. Hoping to come across some Evangelion communities.

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.

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.

My recommendation: Make the ones you care about the msot yourself :)

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.

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

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.

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.

It also doesn't help that it's hard to even keep an eye on smaller magazines right now. As problematic as Reddit's algorithm was, one good thing it did was weight subs so that you'll still them on your frontpage, kbin does not appear to do this. Multireddits were also a very useful tool so I could bookmark a shared new queue for the ones I wanted to follow most closely, in a single tab I'd always keep open.

Hopefully these issues can be addressed.

popular posts having equally good chance to appear and stay in your subscribed feed no matter the size of the community is reddits best algorithm and it worked really well

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.

Maybe in the future, moderators could vote to move a mag/subreddit/community to another instance and bring all their subscribers with them automatically. idk.

I also wonder how many instances are just hosted on some old desktop sitting in a tangle of wires in the basement.

There needs to be durable instance backup/migration tools available to moderators of these communities.

I imagine that'll eventually get done with the limited dev time Lemmy is working with here, but it's still worth considering for a new community.

Bro, the booming is still under way, be patient.

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.

We need a technical backend and all my technical subs. IT, Python, Unreal Engine, Unity3D,

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 not 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.

Slowly trying to figure this site out!

Don't worry, it'll all make sense in time. There are some great guides floating around if you haven't already found them.

I created a home theater magazine (I think). Feel free to post there!

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.

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.

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.