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.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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Asklemmy
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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.
Well thanks for your service at keeping a regional instance running! It may not be my region, but I'm glad it exists at all!
I hope it eventually becomes a "if you build it, they will come" type situation. It will just take time and growth.
Yeah, hopefully! The instance exists since 2021 and we're still small, even with the 2022 Reddit blackout. A lot of people registered then, but quickly realized Reddit was still bigger and went back. It's a shame, but I'll keep it running for as long as I can.
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r/ireland was great (as well as the regional subreddits from Ireland). There is an Irish community (!ireland@lemmy.world)on Lemmy that I try to post to but thereβs just not that much engagement at the moment, having said that, it has improved.
EDIT: added the community.
midwest.social has a few for the midwestern states
Someone had a Dallas or Texas group on here (I forget now), but they had such strict posting rules I stopped posting and the thing died pretty quick after.
There's still a Texas one. I think Dallas and/or DFW died.
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.
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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.
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 couldnβt 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.
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.
Further, unlike at the outset of reddit, people are now really familiar with how thankless and time-consuming being a moderator is.
I'm not eager to have to manage a bunch of communities. If there's a community that I wished existed, but I don't care deeply enough to want to manage it, I'm not going to go out of my way to create it, which leaves the community non-existent. So I think having some ready-made communities from people willing to take on moderation duties is a good thing. Fewer people are willing to make the jump to be a moderator these days, and for good reason.
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.
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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 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.
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More UK/Europe based communities
Americans shoehorning (their own) politics and religion in every single comment thread is so unbelievably boring
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.
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 π
Sorry about that. We're struggling over here and it's on our minds a lot.
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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.
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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.
Yeah I always like to browse those too. You could start a community/post about the shows you're following. I'm thinking of starting something for The Boys, since it's starting now (maybe HotD too?)
Well if you do start one for The Boys I'll prioritize watching the new season asap so I can contribute to the discussions. It looks like it's already started last week, actually.
As for HotD, I can't help ya there. After the last couple seasons of GoT I lost interest in that world. A shame, as I loved it while they still had books to follow.
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Once again here to say I'm surprised Lemmy has no equivalent to KarmaCourt.
Holy shit it's been so long I had completely forgotten about KarmaCourt.
I think the reason we don't is that Karma/Votes aren't really tracked the same way over here?
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Iβve had an idea for a community based around recommending music to each other; youβd post a song or band and get recommendations. Basically a Build my Playlist community.
I dig the heck out of this. I'd sign up.
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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.
more music related subs, like bluegrass, old time, etc. and active users to go in them.
I wish lemmy communties existed for:
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- How are you doing today?
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- Did you discover anything new to your consciousnesses today?
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- I fucke'ed today. Here is how.
Edit: yeah, I think I miss a few of the old subreddit's. Even if there is an equivalent in lemmy, such communities are quite silent.
Hey hey hey there is a TIFU community already.
It totally needs more engagement though
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I wish there was more sports engagement, specifically college and pro football. Itβs about the only thing that keeps me going back over to the other place.
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Tits sub
Ass sub
Resident evil sub
Lonely sub
/c/DSP. Digital signal processing, i.e. how to transform, filter, and live with digital signals (e.g. audio files, image files, video files, sensor measurements, etc.). It involves a lot of math, so unless we get R*ddit-like numbers I don't really know how such a community could keep moving.
Iβd create them if it wasnβt so difficult to host my own Lemmy instance
Most smaller instances will let you make a new community.
Getting people to subscribe, that's your problem.
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