If you recall reddits growth many of their communities evolved as offshoots of a single generic community. This made it easier for people to see discussions they normally would not get involved in, and once the posts in a similar category reached critical mass it moved to a sub Reddit.
I think people are recreating their niche communities here but they are floundering since the user base is still pretty small. Maybe it’s best to post to the “big” communities until the time is right to move to smaller, targeted communities?
I agree - there are plenty of empty magazines setup as subreddit clones. What we really need is a push encouraging content and comment submissions more than anything else. That’s what’s going to drive the development of a vibrant community on kbin.social.
Generally, unless you have at least 20 pieces of content from multiple users with active commentary, most folks will assume it’s a dead community and move on to a bigger community on lemmy.world or similar to find more content. One thing I would suggest for the moderators of growing communities is to always comment on, upvote and boost your contributors’ submissions in the beginning stages of community growth. Your personal engagement of the content is the first step in encouraging your readers to do the same.
That being said, I’d love for folks to create more new niche communities that didn’t exist on Reddit. There’s a lot more freedom here - we should take advantage of it.
I mean, you’re right, but it’s pretty inevitable. There will be a natural wave of creations, inactivity and reclaimings that will take place over the coming couple of years.
For now though, this is wild west internet, so trying to control it would be similar to trying to herd cats with firecrackers.
That statement about herding cats will stay with me for a bit.
/Lights a cracker
