The thing is it’s super hard to start a niche community due to a fundamental issue with federation. Which instance do you start the community in, and how do people find it?
With reddit you just needed /r/[obscurehobby]. In lemmy you need to check all the instances, and you may find a different versions of the community, but all of them are dead with like 2 posts from 8 months ago because they never got the critical mass needed to catch on because the community was split.
Reddit also has the problem that if someone makes a community and starts moderating like a dinghole, it can be hard to get people to join one with better moderation.
With federation you can have the same name multiple times, so when people search “[hobby]” they can see all of them.
Then you could have a merged view of all the [hobby] from different sources, and if a mod who arbitrarily decides to interpret the rules unfairly or err on the side of permanent bans without discussion, warnings, or recourse, you can at least still interact with other [hobby].
That kinda highlights the problem. Search “scuba”. There are 4 separate communities:
There are 39 total posts between them, but the one tied with the most posts has zero active users. The one with the most comments ranks 3rd in posts and only has one active user. The one with the most active user only has 2 comments according to the search.
If I search the same term on sync while signed into .world, I get different communities and very different user counts for those that are in both searches:
None of these communities are really active. But between them they would have had have the user base to get it going. Finding a community and getting the critical mass needed for it to thrive is made much harder with this amount of fragmentation.
Oh I agree, that’s why some users push for consolidation of communities into one single community. I’m just noting that abandoned communities on the fediverse are better presented on Piefed as if there is an active community in the topic you’re looking for, it will be obviously visible ahead of all the others.
As for reddit, there’s not really much left to make on Reddit anymore. Almost every name is taken and sat on by moderators - and it’s pretty hard to meaningfully advertise any new community.
Not that I think Scuba Diving has enough base users on the Fediverse to begin with at this point. Most of those users subscribed are likely abandoned accounts.
It’s the reddit community I most consistently miss. The community there is huge and very active, as are spinoff subs like underwater photography.
But I decided to leave reddit in 2023 with the API changes, and I’ve resisted going back. I like Lemmy, but I feel like I just have to keep my feed set to all, whereas on reddit I had a highly curated list of subs.
The thing is it’s super hard to start a niche community due to a fundamental issue with federation. Which instance do you start the community in, and how do people find it?
With reddit you just needed /r/[obscurehobby]. In lemmy you need to check all the instances, and you may find a different versions of the community, but all of them are dead with like 2 posts from 8 months ago because they never got the critical mass needed to catch on because the community was split.
Reddit also has the problem that if someone makes a community and starts moderating like a dinghole, it can be hard to get people to join one with better moderation.
With federation you can have the same name multiple times, so when people search “[hobby]” they can see all of them.
Then you could have a merged view of all the [hobby] from different sources, and if a mod who arbitrarily decides to interpret the rules unfairly or err on the side of permanent bans without discussion, warnings, or recourse, you can at least still interact with other [hobby].
https://piefed.social/communities
Piefed search is your answer. You can filter by activity. It also has feeds too that are topic themed.
I’d actually argue its way easier now to start new communities on the Fediverse than Reddit, for a variety of reasons.
That kinda highlights the problem. Search “scuba”. There are 4 separate communities:
There are 39 total posts between them, but the one tied with the most posts has zero active users. The one with the most comments ranks 3rd in posts and only has one active user. The one with the most active user only has 2 comments according to the search.
If I search the same term on sync while signed into .world, I get different communities and very different user counts for those that are in both searches:
None of these communities are really active. But between them they would have had have the user base to get it going. Finding a community and getting the critical mass needed for it to thrive is made much harder with this amount of fragmentation.
Oh I agree, that’s why some users push for consolidation of communities into one single community. I’m just noting that abandoned communities on the fediverse are better presented on Piefed as if there is an active community in the topic you’re looking for, it will be obviously visible ahead of all the others.
As for reddit, there’s not really much left to make on Reddit anymore. Almost every name is taken and sat on by moderators - and it’s pretty hard to meaningfully advertise any new community.
Not that I think Scuba Diving has enough base users on the Fediverse to begin with at this point. Most of those users subscribed are likely abandoned accounts.
It’s the reddit community I most consistently miss. The community there is huge and very active, as are spinoff subs like underwater photography.
But I decided to leave reddit in 2023 with the API changes, and I’ve resisted going back. I like Lemmy, but I feel like I just have to keep my feed set to all, whereas on reddit I had a highly curated list of subs.