I’ll go first. I wish Lemmy communities existed for: destroyed tanks. Ukraine War video report. sopranos duckposting. benzodiazepines.
I will comment more as I think of them.
I just want the communities that already exist to have more engagement. It’s pretty demoralizing making a high-effort post and getting only a handful of upvotes and no comments. And it’s like watching a hospice patient visiting a neat-sounding community and realizing all the posts are by the single moderator (and are getting less and less frequent).
I think one of the best ways for folks to contribute to the health of Lemmy would be for everyone to spend some time on “all - new” (or even “all - top hour”) on occasion. “New” on Lemmy is not the cesspool of reposts and garbage that it was on Reddit (although there is a LOT of porn if you don’t have NSFW toggled off), and the quality of the first few pages of “top hour” is usually pretty good (except again for the porn, which it turns out gets pretty decent engagement). I visit “top hour” pretty regularly, and nearly all posts that are stuck in zero-engagement/minimal-engagement pergatory are simply niche content rather than bad content.
We added the scaled sort to help with that(it gives a boost to less active communities), but I don’t know if many people are using it.
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I think one other thing that might help would be to adjust the “Active” sort. I believe it has some kind of hard-coded 2 day limit? So posts older than 2 days will not show up. The problem is that as the sort is working right now, it often displays posts that are 2 days old. This isn’t great for getting new content. It’d be nice if the “Active” sort (or any other other sorts) parameters could be configured somehow.
The active, hot, and scaled sort have that two day bump limit, but active uses the newest comment time for it’s algorithm, whereas hot uses the post creation time.
So the hot sort is better for new trending content, and active is better for topics with new comments.
active uses the newest comment time
I think this is what I don’t like about active sort. Just a single comment is all it needs to bump a highly upvoted post to the top. I feel like it should rather look at an aggregate of recent comments or something along those lines, so that a single comment doesn’t cause such a big effect. It’s kinda like if a single vote could move a post to the top.
visiting a neat-sounding community and realizing all the posts are by the single moderator (and are getting less and less frequent).
This will be a key moment towards Lemmy’s growth or decline. Especially in non-tech/meme/politics communities, it’s so easy for the only poster be a single person who is posting daily, and who then simply runs out of content. Maybe the solution is for each frequent poster to post non-daily on several different communities. Anyway, check out !fedigrow@lemm.ee, @Blaze@reddthat.com has started posting a weekly thread on “How is your niche community doing?”
I’ll check it out, thanks!
More UK/Europe based communities
Americans shoehorning (their own) politics and religion in every single comment thread is so unbelievably boring
Feddit.uk has been great since the admin swap.
does that happen a lot here or are you venting about the other platform?
The majority of users are surely from the US, and so questions that don’t specify origin but whose answers may be more properly dictated by knowing their origin end up getting answered by the majority US user-base, even though the original person asking the question isn’t from the US.
It’s fair that people from elsewhere shouldn’t always have to specify they’re from elsewhere because the entire internet does not exist just in the USA, the USA just has an outsized influence on the internet. I can see how that frustration could arise and why European-based communities would be helpful. It’s the same issue on reddit, if you’re not on a country-specific-level-sub, the default answers are from US users.
It’s genuinely an issue, and I say this as an American, mostly because I’m guilty of it myself. We absolutely dominate the online discourse and usually default to assuming questions that don’t specify where they are about must be American. It’s a very Amerocentric view of the world and the internet.
+1 for good UK/European communities.
The majority of users are surely from the US
Hmm citation needed? I’m not so sure a majority is from the US, even if US users is the largest group.
What I find most annoying is stuff like /c/news and /c/politics (on any instance) being actually only about US news or US politics. And then you need /c/world_news to be actual news from around the world. I wish more instances did what Beehaw did and made /c/news into the world news community and then made /c/usnews to be… well, US news.
Well put, but my point was that politics and religion shouldn’t ever be mentioned unless you want to start an argument. It’s just not a thing in civilised countries. You just don’t talk about it because nothing you say will change anyone’s beliefs about either subject in any way whatsoever, and it’s just antagonistic.
Americans will bring politics or religion into meme threads, shitposts, casual conversation, comic strips etc etc
If you’re not on a political sub or a news sub, you’re here for a laugh, and fuck me neither of those subjects is ever humourous
Pls stop 😅
Sorry about that. We’re struggling over here and it’s on our minds a lot.
my point was that politics and religion shouldn’t ever be mentioned unless you want to start an argument
Firstly, I agree that there is a time and a place and a lot of people seem to not know the boundaries.
That being said, bringing up a controversial subject isn’t always just about a fight. It might seem like it is, but sometimes we just want to discuss an issue.
Also, even arguing has its merit. While you’re not going to change the mind of the person you’re arguing with, you might sway the opinions of bystanders.
But yeah, I agree keep it out of shitposts.
A 90dayfiance community. Also a local community that posted more than once a week.
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I miss the non-porn nudes threads, Normalnudes and NakedProgress, the ones with an “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything” policy where people of all body types could show their shape and/or their fitness progress.
I miss the “Tales from…” subs. Tales from tech support was regular reading material for me for many years, and in general just having a place to commiserate with others in the same field as you is wonderful. The other ones also helped me be more concious of what I could do to keep myself from being a nuisance to other professionals like my doctor and pharmacist.
More niche, I miss the gunpla sub a lot. We have subs for model making and tabletop miniatures, but the gunpla community was very well run.
In general, I think the lack of moderation tools has made it difficult for communities to do regular “event” posts and the like which used to really help keep subs alive, guide discussions, and gave good examples of the type of content that fit. Like it’s a lot easier to start a new conversation at a party where everyone is talking than to be the first person to speak up in a silent room.
We’re definitely smaller than the Reddit gunpla sub, but I’m really enjoying the gunpla community on lemmy. Everyone’s chummy and welcoming. I’d love to see any you’ve built!
Honestly I wish there were less communities. I’ve said this before, but people treat Lemmy like late-stage Reddit, expecting niche communities for everything, and we end up with hundreds of communities with no (or one, if we’re lucky) active members.
This problem is then amplified by the fact that these niche communities are split even further across several instances, so our userbase ends up completely dissipated.
I would love to see users focus on a smaller number of more general-purpose communities. Of course, these should still be shared across instances, but I think we would benefit a lot from having, say, a “video games” community instead of 500 specific game communities.
As a side note as well, I don’t think we shouldn’t be “allowed” to create more niche communities (though if an instance admin wanted to regulate, that’s their call). I think this should be more of a user culture shift, if anything.
I honestly don’t think Lemmy will function well without a way for identical communities across different instances could subscribe to eachother, allowing a single feed of information. This would stop the instances splitting the userbase.
Early Reddit had a subreddit for everything, but most were dormant. However as soon as you posted on it, enough people had it on their front page that you’d get a response. I think Lemmy feels very similar to how Reddit did 10 years ago, except many of the dead communities are totally dead.
This is a good point. Reddit originally had no communities. Then there were maybe a dozen, all picked by the admins… and already /r/Atheism was one of them, because that’s how the userbase went. People who don’t understand why such a community was necessary do not remember living through 90s / 00s American culture.
I disagree. There’s no problem with hundreds of niche communities. They create the opportunity for a real community to form simply by people subscribing to them. And if nobody posts on them, they are still there, not hurting anyone. But if someone does post on them, then everyone who is subscribed to that muni can see that post. So the worst case scenario is basically neutral, and the best case scenario is people have some posts in their feed for their niche interest.
When I moved to Lemmy from Reddit (about a year ago) and wanted to look for the equivalent of r/Ireland here, I was met with about 5 or 6 different communities (spread across various instances). You couldn’t really call any of them active, occasionally someone would post a link to a news article but there was no engagement.
Things have improved since then but I definitely agree with your point.
Lemmy is generally too small for it, but I liked the small regional subreddits like states, counties, and cities.
I know there is a Lemmy instance focused on Atlanta and Atlanta news but that’s about it.
I run a regional instance (lemmy.pt, for Portugal and the Portuguese language) and I definitely feel the hardships of Lemmy being so small. It’s very hard to grow more specialized communities when the overall pull of the platform is so small, since most people looking for ““niche”” topics would rather stick to the bigger communities on Reddit and whatnot instead of opting for the tiny thing going on the Fediverse.
Even on reddit, PT subs are hard to get active. There is /r/Portugal, literaciafinanceira and maybe devpt. I think you are stretching too thin.
Have you thought of just doing 1 sub on Lemmy.pt, and just add [tags] in the title or something? Once Lemmy.pt has enough users, you could slowly open more.
Yeah, sure. That’s because we’re also fairly small and Reddit isn’t really that popular, especially among older folks.
Regarding the 1 sub, I don’t think the issue is having too many communities, seeing as !portugal@lemmy.pt serves as a main hub and has pretty loose restrictions already. The issue is more of the overall visibility of Lemmy paired with the low usage of Reddit-like mediums in Portugal.
Literally the only thing I miss about Reddit is my city sub.
I used to miss my local city sub more, but the current mods have basically turned it into a reddit version of Nextdoor.
10 years ago it was mostly punks and weirdos on the sub, then all the normies came and even the fucking local sheriff.
The local sheriff finally fucked off after he got called out for trying to hire a murderer from a neighboring jurisdiction.
I feel like if Lemmy could get big enough, we could get back to where the interesting people are all in one place again.
Our city sub never really had those kinds of issues, drama to be sure from time to time, but for the most part it was just a great place to learn what events were happening that weekend. Or get inside info on something that happened in the news, etc. I have checked in on it a couple times since deleting my Reddit accounts, but it’s not the same and feels off since joining lemmy.
JapanLife and JapanFinance. Tons of knowledge for people living in Japan where language, the legal system, etc. all are much easier to navigate with the help of people who have been here. They never really got off the ground in the fediverse and are the only reason I still go to reddit.
InfoWarriorRides / SchizophreniaRides, for pictures of cars with batshit crazy messages on them.
100YearsAgo could be mirrored here via bot and not miss much.
Other subs were great for their discussion more than than linked content - Civvie11, GunnerkriggCourt, DresdenCodak, QContent. Not so much DumbingOfAge because it devolved into a hatedom sub. I guess most of that should be lumped into comic and game-video communities. I could “be the change” and start posting speedruns willy-nilly.
LinkIsCute is here but pretty dead.
Polandball, holy shit!
It’s really not possible unless Lemmy gets a much larger community, but the thing I miss most about Reddit are episode discussions for TV shows. For almost any show, I could be pretty confident that I’d be able to find a post-watch episode discussion. Those are great for seeing how people felt about the episode or to learn things I may have overlooked.
Once again here to say I’m surprised Lemmy has no equivalent to KarmaCourt.
I really want there to be a community for Dropout as I love their content but I haven’t found a good space to talk with others about them that doesn’t involve some corporation harvesting my data.
I was the change I want to be in the world and have made !dropout@lemmy.blahaj.zone, hopefully people use it 😅
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I’ve had an idea for a community based around recommending music to each other; you’d post a song or band and get recommendations. Basically a Build my Playlist community.
Duck posting? Benzodiazepines?
Wat
benzodiazepines
drug addict echo chamber subreddit
people like you like to pretend that Lemmy is so much better than Reddit, then you just walk around spewing hate about people you don’t know. why are you here? you’d be much more at home on Reddit with that attitude
I just stated my view on a subreddit. Was I incorrect? Don’t take it so personally
you just called me and my friends drug addicts and I’m not supposed to take it personally? I recently started having benzos prescribed for panic attacks, and it’s been a great resource for learning about my medication. then I have to sit here and listen to you shame me for talking to people about my psychiatric meds? Go sit on a wire brush.
I don’t believe for half a second that you don’t understand why it was taken personally, which means not only are you walking around insulting people for no apparent reason, you’re also playing dumb. I don’t fuck with either of those so I’m done talking with you.
Literally scroll the front page of r/benzodiazepines
