Thinking about entertainment communities and other broader focus communities
Gradually we've been seeing the tv and movies or shows and movies communities pick up activity, which is good, and the multiple games communities each seem to be doing okay too.
Entertainment
However, there remains kind of an awkward spot where there's not exactly a general entertainment community (outside of Beehaw, that is) from what I can tell. There is an existing community, !entertainment@lemm.ee, though that someone could try to pick up and make active.
This could serve as a catchall for some of the more business-oriented news and some of the fluff celebrity chatter, depending on how one wants to go with it. Worth noting for celebrity chatter there is also !popculturechat@sh.itjust.works though.
Music
In a similar vein, while there's a variety of music communities, there's only a few generic ones, with the largest outside of Beehaw and Hexbear being the largely undefined Music community on Lemmy World. The lack of definition, that is, no sidebar guidance on what the community may be used for, makes it unclear what the community's expectations/preferences for posts are.
As with entertainment, this could be where more music business news could find its home, alongside some band chatter. Although as with entertainment, there's a music-themed community for the chatter to be found at !popheads@poptalk.scrubbles.tech for those interested.
Sports
Likewise with sports, there's a ton of different sports communities, but only two large generic communities to be found on Beehaw and Hexbear (supposing Lemmyverse is accurate). Before any of the more specific sports communities can gain more activity, I think it'd help to have a generic sports community to help people get oriented and find likeminded folks to form whatever specific communities they'd like.
Much like the first two, this could be for sports news and chatter...But unlike the first two, I can't find any generic fluff sports star/team chat communities.
Ideas on How and Where to Organize
In each of these cases regarding broader communities, I think following a similar organizational approach to Beehaw could be a good idea, but they would be better suited to instances more openly federated and not at as much risk of defederation. A few Lemmy instances that come to mind for this are Lemmee, ShitJustWorks, Lemmy Zip, and perhaps Reddthat?
I'm not sure where Mbin instances are in terms of federation smoothness and stability, otherwise I might suggest some of them. On a different note, if there were more Piefed instances I might suggest them, but last I checked the flagship seems to still be the largest and isn't open for community creation.
In short: there's good opportunities for broad, generic topic communities for entertainment, music, and sports on more widely federated instances. At the same time, even where these communities may exist on some widely federated instances, opportunity remains for more clearly defined variations of these communities to encourage posting with less uncertainty.
Both of these instances (and many others) are part of the network of topic-specific instances that I've created and now I'm looking to find a way to share with other admins.
The only problem at the moment is that I'm the only with access to these instances, but if you want to create new communities I can give you an account on them.
Thank you for your post, it's interesting. I indeed like Beehaw's communities, as I said in a previous post: https://lemmy.world/post/14728410
However, I guess for some of those topics, we went beyond it. For entertainment for instance, based on the posts since last month, !entertainment@beehaw.org is either about movies or TV shows, which we have now covered, as you mentioned. Business news are usually posted on them too, and it seems to be okay.
By the way, we are looking for mods on !showsandmovies@lemm.ee, if you are interested, let me know!
For !music@lemmy.world, seems like the only active mod is happy with the current status. Maybe you can reach out to them to see if it would be possible to have more defined rules and guidelines, and what they want to do with the community?
Sport is an interesting topic. There was !olympics@sh.itjust.works during the Olympics, and most of the stuff happened there. For a more generic sport community, I'm not sure it would be the best once there is enough traction. We now have a few people on !football@lemmy.world, but I guess that would become spammy if we were to have match threads on a generic sport community for people who don't care about the sports.
I also feel like star/team chats are mostly sport dependent. I live in Europe, I could not for the life of me name 3 top NFL or NBA athletes, I guess it must be the same for US people and European football. And as above, we also post athlete news on the sport community, and it seems to get good reception.
!popculturechat@sh.itjustworks seems promising, maybe there will be other people interested in getting that one revived? The only mod hasn't been active since a year.