Like others, I came over when Reddit was banning 3rd party apps. Many communities were being started and I wanted to help. So I chose one community to form here and try and grow. And we did! There was a time a short while in the little KC Chiefs community was in the top 100 communities on Lemmy world. I knew that wouldn’t last that we would be outpaced by many more broad appeal communities but I didn’t predict the reverse in engagement growth that has come. Stagnation sure, I didn’t think Lemmy was going to surpass reddit for a long while yet, but not the barren communities of today. Meme communities and the “small gripe” adjacent communities are doing fine, but it seems all others have shrunk. I tried to keep the Kerbal Space Program community active for a bit but had to return to the official forums and even subreddit for discussion. The post I made in the Go community here remains the only post in the community.
A platform led by a CEO who edits comments of users, lies about other professionals and then double downs on the lie when proven to be a liar can’t be trusted. And in general I prefer the decentralized open source backbone of Lemmy to the ad ridden, rage bait and bug filled Reddit. I’d love for this to be my full time home for discussing my niche interests but that’s not possible without others engaging with the content.
I posted a lot in the beginning, tried to comment a lot too but now it feels like talking to myself when I make a new post in the community I started and get few or no responses. What can be done? Community specific advice is nice, but I’m looking more for Lemmy World level solutions as I’m sure there’s many many other niche communities I’m not apart of experiencing the same thing.
There are a few niche communities that are doing well here. The Trekkies that meme over at risa, the NCD crowd and their Military-Industrial Complex fetish, and the meme community in general is fairly healthy and active.
But I agree with you that there isn’t that critical mass that Reddit has that allows organic niche growth to occur. We’re simply too small. Even small Reddit communities like /r/Kenshi (131k) or /r/Factorio (347k) have more subscribers than the entirety of all Lemmy instances (60k). It’s impossible to compete when there is such a mismatch of scale, especially against behemoths like /r/funny with subscriber bases in the millions.
What can we do? Just keep making this place our home. Post interesting things you find on the Internet, copypasta memes, that sort of stuff. I don’t know if it’ll grow it but if enough of us do this it won’t stagnate.
Risa and other meme subs are perhaps a bit too successful. I already unsubscribed from one men’s sub and am thinking about risa because they just dominate my feed too much.
Risa is something else at the moment lol… gee wilikers
Go them!