Fediverse

Here's something I learned, don't be afraid to block. Political sub you don't want? blocked. Person shouting about China in a cat sub? blocked.

Also add blacklisted keywords, it cuts down on politics a ton

We have to be the thing we want to see out in the world. If we want open source communities and an internet free of corporate influence then we have to do the work required to build them. It's not going to happen by magic.

Yes Lemmy is smaller and doesn't have instantly fully formed communities. Reddit has been around for almost 2 decades. Lemmy is newer, smaller, and actively fights the sorts of shenanigans that Reddit initially used to get big.

If you want more niche activity, make posts and interact with posts. Lemmy is user driven- that means you. It isn't a giant megasite where you can just expect to be a passive receiver of endless content.

Well you should come hang out with us at Out of Context Comics! Not a lot of politics but a lot of gay innuendo. A lot.

https://lemmy.world/c/outofcontextcomics

Lurk on Reddit. Post on Lemmy.

Yeah I want to get off Reddit but this place is small and is very political. It's a tiny echo chamber. A very very small one.

you gotta realize reddit didn't just "appear" one day with those obscure niche topics built out. There is a network effect large communities have. We need hundreds of thousands more members before that is possible.

I think you probably weren't there for early reddit, but most of the active posters here on Lemmy were. It was tiny. Like Lemmy.

You can't force those niche communities to exist here. It doesn't work. But what you can do is post and create valuable content. and eventually we may get there.

It's still a tiny echo chamber like it was a couple months ago when I cut back on Lemmy use. It can get pretty repetitive and boring to read. I came back to Reddit because the user base was larger and there were more perspectives I could hear from.

Well Lemmy is a possible replacement for Reddit but, putting aside my strong biais for Lemmy, it doesn't have to be a Reddit replacement for everyone and it is still building itself up. Here is a few tips to improve your time in hope you'll find on the fediverse the space you look for :

• Try write post on dead looking community. Follower counts have a hard time synchronizing btw instances. A lot of people may be waiting for some activity to happened.
• Try opening niche community in their original instance. The posts wrote on a distance community before the first lemming of your instance opens it are invisible and must be added one by one (by entering it URL in your instance search function). You might found interesting content you missed.
• Try reposting content you see on Reddit on Lemmy. Copy-Paste it and add something like "R*eddit content - OP : @[email protected]" somewhere in the post. You might not have as much response as OP but it can stir up interesting conversation.
• Try to make an account on the twittoverse (Mastodon, *key...). The community on the microblogging side of the fediverse is much bigger and diverse. You will be able to boost your lemmy content and link it to hashtag so more people may see it. Answer to the original post will even show up on Lemmy. But second level comments will not fediverse well.
• Try to post articles, general question or to do anything to bring some animation to your niche community. Regularity in low engagement content will still bring people that will sooner or later start to engage.
• Don't hesitate to crosspost any related post to your favorite community. Community are silos, instances are silos and the lemming populating is very fragmented. By linking communities together, you'll bring people with the same hobbies than you to the community they did not find out yet. -Don't hesitate to answer at old post. Us lemmings don't have enough activity to complain about people writing back months later, especially in niche community.

Cheers!

Feel free to block communities with political content.

You can also use an app or alternative frontend to filter keywords. [email protected] has a post about that.

For communities, [email protected] can help

For home kit, the Apple communities are probably more active, and you should be able to post about it there too

Unfortunately, there's no easy way around it. Fediverse is small, and while we should always encourage people's migration, it will probably remain small for the time being.

And freedom to express everything combined with people learning their behavior on algorithmic content will be an issue until a strong Fediverse culture is established. The times of pioneers are over, the times of "truly a place for everyone" are not yet there, and in between, we have a very weird mixture, sometimes bringing out the worst of many people.

I hope Fediverse will survive through this phase, and if yes, bright times will be ahead. But it will take a lot of work. Many non-political communities have already started blocking political content, and for the time being, I believe that's for the better. People need a place to chill and have a corner of their own, not face what they ran away from in the first place.

A lot of focus is put onto posting, but I like to encourage commenters. I'll post and respond all day, but if nobody is interacting, it's going to stay quiet. Put the quiet to your advantage by doing things like:

If you like an image, say what you like about it. Lately, I've been having people talk about how they really have been enjoying dawn/dusk pictures, so I've been collecting more of that so I can post what people are in the mood for. It gives me good feedback, it gives people a chance to agree or disagree with you, and you got to participate.

Do you ask anyone any question? Take advantage of the relative quiet. With not having a million comments on every post, I have plenty of time to give you really detailed answers. I got asked how to differentiate between 2 animals yesterday, and I had time to make a nice visual guide, highlighting key differences and giving multiple visual examples of potential variations while still simplifying the process of identification. If there's a million people talking like on Reddit, it's hard to give people that much attention, but here it's easy. I pretty much take time to respond to every comment.

Don't be afraid to go off topic. Rules seem to be looser in many communities because of the low post count. This week, I posted something from a country with a different language, and I ended up having 3 days of conversation with a native speaker who filled me in on tons of subtleties of the language pertaining to our niche topic. I got to learn so much, and they got to learn a few things about English.

I feel you have to do something to have a good time here, but it needn't be to post multiple things every day, but it's more than just up or downvoting something like you can get away with on Reddit. We're too small for you to have a free ride. But make someone laugh. Let them know that you liked their post with a short comment. If you don't like it, say hey, do you have any content on such and such instead. Make a post saying, hey, what's your thoughts on this? It doesn't need to be something groundbreaking or insightful, you just need to give a sign of life so we know you're here, and one of us will probably talk back to you.

Interact enough like that, and you may find what you enjoy doing, if that turns out to be posting, or you become the resident expert on a topic even if you're not an expert, being a serial commenter, or whatever it may be. It's a great opportunity if you make it one because it is so easy to get attention here if you try.

I'm not typically a social person, but being here has let me talk about what I want, when I want, and somebody will listen to it, and I can ask about things I want to know and get answers. There's much less shouting into the void like at Reddit. Play Lemmy to its strengths and you will find enjoyment. And if you don't like it, go to where you're happy. Nobody's going to hate you if you split time between here and Reddit.

Seeing all the cats made me realize that we need to all participate to make the community what we want it to be. It’s clear to me there are a lot of lurkers based on the influx of cat pictures. The more we start posting in ANY instance the more visibility there will be for active users.

I like it as a platform but the userbase just isn't there.

Don't let your desire for something you want right now ruin something you can have in the future. At one point r/homekit didn't exist, didn't stop you from not caring.

I know I can post and be the change I seek.

Imo, this is your answer. I'm not sure exactly what other solution you want. Content will not appear on Lemmy without someone first posting it. Advertising the platform to help draw people in is also important.

Politics is the one thing we all have in common.

The good old days where everyone watched the same five TV shows and discussed them are over.

I hate reddit as a platform but I still have to use it every once in a while because people won't move to Lemmy/mbin/piefed.

I honestly don't understand it. People complain that they don't use the fediverse because it's small but somehow they don't realize if they just migrate over then it won't be.

It's aggravating how dumb people can be but hey, that's the world we're living in. I'll continue to use Lemmy and visit reddit if I have to.

Reading the comments here made me realize something.

It’s nice to have good content for niche communities that you enjoy but that’s always been a tall order. As in, a lot of things have to go right to get that organic community feeling and I’ve honestly always thought of it as a privilege and not a right.

I’ve seen plenty of communities die for various reasons or just been in a position where I didn’t have passion to go and talk about my niche interests.

So what’s my point? Niche communities are the icing on the cake of a good platform. When we mostly have for profit platforms and little main stream interest in standardized alternatives, you got to be more realistic.

I know I can filter content. I know I can post and be the change I seek. Yet, it feels like an uphill battle.

It doesn't look like you mentioned subscriptions, which gets you out of the 'all' / 'filtering' side of things entirely. But just as with Reddit, you'll need to spend time building your personal feed over time and tweaking it.

The good news is that there's no limit to your subscriptions (unlike Reddit's cap of 50 displayed at any one time), but that you'll need to use the right tools to search the Fediverse to find those communities you want to subscribe to.

The main tool I typically use seems to have a bug right now (based on the recent software upgrade?) but I suspect will be back up in a few days. You might take a look at this, tho, plus other resources.

One suggestion I saw a while ago was to use more general communities for things you're interested in and as it grows then the more niche communities can be made. Ex: post about a specific game you like in gaming up until enough people like it to make a sub for that game. Or post about a song you don't know in asklemmy until enough people do that to make whatsthissong

I totally get wanting the niche communities and, personally, I just lurk reddit completely not voting, posting, or commenting unless as a last resort if I really need to find info that Lemmy isn't able to provide.

It's a slow process and I don't think there'll be another boost of users in Lemmy until reddit does another thing that enshittifies it to annoy people to leave.

You're right in one sense; the community is small and can have an echo chamber effect like any "small village." But you can also try other instances, or other Fediverse things or start your own. It goes like this; Reddit had success because they served you interesting things on a silver platter, using extensive venture capital to make it as slick and addictive and popular as possible. Lemmy is not built on capital, at least not on the same scale as Reddit; it is built on labor. You gotta decide what your ideal is.

All I’m getting lately in my feed are cats!

Use one of the apps so you can filter out content. "Trump, Trump's, Republicans, Musk" seems to take care of the problem so far.I think I have some communities blocked and maybe a user or two aswell.

I like lemmy because I can't doomscroll

reddit was once smaller than it is now too

Jokes on you the political content here is from the redditors who pretended to quit their award fueled addiction by also joining lemmy.

Seriously though, compare c/Politics to c/Worldnews or c/News. There is a very large dissonance between the comments shared despite both communities posting the same news info..

You have fallen for the ultimate trick: wanting a "big" community.

You only get that from big, centralized social networks that want to maximize the amount of content you are fed, because it maximizes your ad views, and their profits.

Embrace the smallness. Lemmy still has room to grow, and having lot of different options for communication that aren't all owned by billionaires is a good thing. The fact that it isn't constantly trying to earn your attention is a feature, not a bug.