Back with newsgroups the general rule was to go from general to specific. You start with a general discussion group and when discussions about video games get annoying you create a games group. If then there are too many Baldur’s Gate discussions you create BG. If they are dominated by Baldur’s Gate 3 you create a Baldur’s Gate 3 group. If everyone is fawning over Withers you create a Withers group which of course will be flooded with discussion about the Withers’ tits mod, which shall get its own group.
Meaning you should create a group when demand is there and not the other way around.
Hello,
I see you commented on [email protected]. Would you qualify it as a community with discussion, or just a time waster?
I guess movies would be a specific enough topic for me, but what I mean is people with a passion for, say, film noir shouldn’t wait for film noir fans to show up on a thread, they should just create the content and hope the others find it.
I want to be clear that I’m not judging any “time waster” type of communities. It’s fun to discuss random questions during downtime at work, it’s just not where a strong community is formed. Reddit lives on through everything precisely because of the niche communities, not because of r/pics or something
I suppose part of the problem with many nicher community concepts is that on here, for many, it is often screaming into the abyss. You can’t keep a flow of content going in many cases. Meaning it just sits there quietly. And if someone down the line happens to join lemmy and be interested, it’s conceivable they’ll see the small community you made, think its dead, and then make their own. I think niche communities can work, but there needs to be a way for the owner to post new content every day without just seeming to talk to themselves. My ObscureMusic community works in that sense because I have a large amount of obscure music that (if anyone’s noticed) I’m going down alphabetically lol.
I actually think the answer to this is that lemmy needs some kind of built-in categorisation system.
There are some people I have noticed just screaming into the void and I somehow stumbled on their community by chance. If I have any interest I follow and try to post too, and even if I don’t have interest I at least toss them a quick “I see you, community building is hard, good luck!” message. I cannot lift up every community by myself, but I can at least try to help a bit with anything I fall into that I have at least a mild interest in.
That’s what the weekly fedigrow post is for too, feel free to redirect them there, it might help them
Yeah, I was holding off because I’m still compiling the list lol, that is why I only ever popped it in that comment and not in a new thread yet. Want to find gaming genre communities that aren’t just my personal Subscribed list to add, that feels selfish otherwise
Piefed has topics: https://piefed.social/topic/tv-movies
Who adds to them?
Instance admins
Yeah [email protected] isn’t there so its a bit outdated (as is [email protected] still there) so its very outdated. I get the concept tho.
Oh, I forgot about this site. I certainly can use it to do proof-of-concept for ideas here, but I’m thinking more of beyond me. A wider-used tool (and imo with more/better categories)
Users can create feeds too: https://piefed.social/feeds