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.
They're just following rules, man:
Rule 33. Lurk More - It's never enough.
And yes, the pool is still closed.
Patrollin' and tryna catch me lurkin' dirty
Here is my post tribute.
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. 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.
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.
Reddit doesn't own these communities. The members do. Inasmuch these mods are interested in helping or were complicit in making Reddit a toxic place should be for the new communities to decide.
I'm not really sure... but the way I see it it's probably fair game.
Communities aren't something that somebody (reddit, specific moderators, etc.) owns, they are just concepts that people latch onto. And, for me at least, I would rather see popular communities exist here if people want them to, especially since you can have multiple communities under the exact same name on different servers in the fediverse.
In other words, if you want to bring over a specific reddit community I think you should just do it.
What if we had some kind of artificial intelligence that just generated content? 🤔
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!
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 :)
Thank you for starting a community! I hope it's a great experience ^^
Ooh, fantastic! Amateur house and locking dancer here. Joined!
Amateur dancer here
Just subscribed too. Thanks!
The issue everyone is facing right now is we are expecting to immediately shift to a ready made alternative for Reddit in less than 2 weeks.
I mean Reddit happened over a course of 15 years. At least. Expecting to replicate the same diversity and engagements within 2 weeks is too much.
Right now the community is in 'move house' mode with lots of activity and excitement. It will all come to a calm once the shift is complete and we are all in our new home.
Then in the next few days... We will start hanging pictures and arranging the countertops(aka adding niche subs and improving engagements).
Honestly I'm only here because this place is surprisingly more fun than Reddit now - especially on mobile - normally I'd be telling everyone to wait 6-12 months and see how it goes. I think we have the people here now, but it'll still be months before the vibe here is really set and everything has a nice clean flow.
Give it time, and everything will settle in.
Congratulations! You get to help found those niche communities in a new place!
Ugh.. I was following really stupid subs on reddit like the real housewives subs and the fallguys sub. It was my after/ during work entertainment but I am afraid the people in these subs won't be the ones that switch the platform anytime soon. Healthy for my braincells, though (for those 2 that are left).
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.
It's not easy at all! However there is less pressure with the federation system now. If the community goes way off base one can make another.
I’m not mad at that. I’ll probably hold off until there are decent mod tools then start seeding some niche places.
Best of luck getting your old niché communities back!
Funny you say that, Reddit thinks mods grow on trees.
Yes, as I understand it you simply remove your unpaid workforce and there are throngs of capable masses waiting in the wings ready to take the yoke of thanklessly propping up your multi-billion dollar company on their shoulders for free. I don't know why this isn't perfectly clear to everyone.
Yeah that is understandable.
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.
Lemmy is just not as approachable or user friendly as other social media. I consider myself pretty tech savvy and even I’m not 100% sure I completely understand how the Fediverse works.
Yeah, it may be better than alternatives for a lot of reasons but not for the ones that matter to most people. Imagine the people that use Reddit casually. They’re likely even less willing to try new things. People want stuff that “just works”, they don’t want a long winded explanation about networks and decentralization.
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.
Yeah, most of my stock of saved memes are from r/animemes and r/anime_irl. They did at least make it through the filter of being funny enough at the time to compel me to save them. And they're not necessarily ones that would be easily found by looking at the top posts in those subs.
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)
howling into the void
Yep that's what feels like, and it's part of starting a community because how is anyone going to find you if you're not making any noise?
It's actually exciting. During my first week around here, someone framed it as the shift from consuming content to making contact and I found that really compelling
The other thing I'm thinking about is how the other site was like joining a conversation, but here we are starting conversations
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.
The more that happens, the more fractured the community becomes, and the easier it will be for a new centralized corporate platform to suck up users. That's how Reddit started in the first place, and how Twitter started. Heck, it's even how LJ started. You look at fractured elements of communities, and build a site for the whole community to come together.
Except that the "for the whole community to come together" part is already provided by the Fediverse, built right in to the foundations. There's no "service" for the next Reddit to provide to these separate forums because they can already freely exchange with each other. They are not fractured.
Sure, just show me the combined DnD/D&D or TTRPG community | magazine | group. It doesn't exist. There are a hundred, or a thousand, individual groups. That's not a whole community. That's a thousand fractal shards, each one with its own voices, independent of one another. Yes, occasionally they do share content or users, but that happens only rarely and with effort. TTRPG Network, Lemmy.ML, KBin.Social, Mastodon.Social, etc., all have various groups dedicated to RPGs. These groups are not able to be combined.
The inability of these groups to combine and independently organizing is a severe weakness of ActivityPub.
Make it and they will come!
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)
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
The posts I saw fell into these rough categories:
I think the only things related to linguistics that weren't welcome were posts where people come up with folk etymologies, spreading disproven theories or claiming one language being superior than another.
Conlanging: You'd sometimes see questions about linguistics in general (usually typology) by a conlanger, but I don't think I ever saw anything other than that. I would guess that links relating to conlangs/conlanging were deleted, with a suggestion to post them to /r/conlangs instead.
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.
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.
@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.
If it's showing up on the microblog, it's probably Mastodon posts showing up there with the #knitting - and the moderator has set the magazine to automatically pull them in. Not much you can do - other than pump-priming thinsg by posting some interesting content/questions. I guess.
Yeah this is my understanding of it: the knitting magazines I've found so far are just all Mastadon-related.
I don't care for the format of Twitter, so I don't see myself taking to Mastadon too well.
There are at least three communities for crochet between Lemmy and Kbin. I didn't check knitting but would be surprised if it doesn't exist soon =)
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.
As has been said, I expect those will fill in before too long. The wave of fledditors (including me) are still finding our way around and creating new communities that we miss. In a few months the landscape will look a lot more solid.
It's in our hands. Right now the infrastructure is in the process of being built. That Lemmy, Kbin and the Fediverse in general is the the place to go only became clear a couple weeks ago.
I'm happy Jerboa is now working, major instances now being resposive. Time to build the communities, look into running your own instance. It's worth to do more work now than you can later sustain, to help build the new place.
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)
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
Speaking of those large subs. Does anyone have the equivalent of world news, news, and games subreddits here?
I found a technology one, just need to grab those other ones. Links appreciated.
Lemmy.world/lemm.ml have worldnews, news and game subs. Not sure about kbin.
Thank you. Wefwef is awesome but search is a little flaky.
For world news I am using lemmy.ml/c/worldnews, seems to be the most active one across the fediverse.
On kbin:
News
Could someone please join AznIdentity? Anyone? Please?
aznidentity
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.
Here you go!
https://possumpat.io/c/gundam
https://kbin.social/m/gundam
Will you pilot the robot start the magazine or not? If not, we'll just have to send Ayanami out again.
I have a buddy who’s into gundam, I’ll let him know about it when I tell him about Lemmy if you give me a link :)
Here you go!
https://possumpat.io/c/gundam
https://kbin.social/m/gundam
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.
Yeah im single-handedly trying to build a HEMA group. Someone made the instance but no one posts or comments
@Treedrake We can create magazines like this one.
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.
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.
My recommendation: Make the ones you care about the msot yourself :)
Come joing us over on https://kbin.social/m/benignexistence :) It's quiet out there.
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.
I miss bakingfails and the nail polish community :/
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.
I created a place for model trains: @modeltrains / !modeltrains@kbin.social (on Lemmy, if that link doesn't work you should use the search button by your username to look up https://kbin.social/m/modeltrains).
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 now 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.
If you help them , contact them, we can get them over.
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.
Lemmyverse is a good directory of sorts.
There's a few directory searches I know of.
One is over on feddit.de. It only searches lemmy instances atm, though, and idk how or how well it's updated as things are made. It seems to go by community name, so for example "drawing" does not return sketching subs and the first result under "art" is Star Trek.
The other is lemmyverse.net, which seems to parse searches FAR better. With the drawback that neither of those recognizes anything on kbin yet.
It's helped me here and there and apart from the drawbacks like the first one's behavior, I wonder if my (and @Treedrake 's) trouble is a combination of my own interests being niche and most of the people engaging in those interests being on mastodon instead of here. Fediverse Party and Fedi Directory both tell me there are sizable resources for what I'm looking for, just not through a forum.
This severely limits lemmy as it can't interface with mastodon tweets/microblogs, and hinders me as well until I have the ability to follow tags and see them in a dedicated feed.
This is one of those circumstances where forum and blogging culture don't really mesh well. The audience is present but already busy with their own thing, and we're expecting a different form of interaction than they are.
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.
We need a technical backend and all my technical subs. IT, Python, Unreal Engine, Unity3D,
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.
Be proactive :)
Redifugee here. I got here and created a community for Santa Fe, NM, USA (@SantaFe ), and another for Photobiomodulation/ Red Light Therapy (@photobiomodulation ). LoL, it's ain't much, but it's honest work.
I created a home theater magazine (I think). Feel free to post there!
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.
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.
Don't worry, it'll all make sense in time. There are some great guides floating around if you haven't already found them.
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
It just takes time for these communities to form.
save