Part of the problem is the smaller instances don't even see those communities when you post, I was unaware of 75% of the communities you just listed. I have a micro instance, and if I don't subscribe I don't see it.
It's probably not much of an issue, given that most people are on a couple mega instances...
I know community discoverability can be an issue. When I launched !imaginary@reddthat.com and !dragonball@ani.social, I used my alts on the top 10 instances to subscribe to them so that they would show in the All feed of those instances.
There was a tool that could help address that (I don't have the name right now), but last time I tried it, it wasn't working, so I'm not sure it's that useful.
To be honest as mentioned elsewhere I'm not the most convinced about having all of the theme instances managed by rglullis.
Raphael, don't get me wrong, you are doing a very good job, and I really hope you'll succeed with your new NLNet grant, but having all of those instances depending on you, even if you seem to have a backup person, seems risky.
@sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al, also the Euro 2024 is starting later this week, I think it's just too late to migrate now if we want a decent level of activity during the event. We can always revisit later, but I wouldn't move now.
I do own lemmy.futbol if someone would want to co create an instance, but frankly I do not have a lot of free time so I could only help out in a supporting capacity
I've been most invested into helping !jrpg@lemmy.zip get going. It seems like there are plenty of lurkers and a growing amount of engagement by comments, but people are still shy about posting links or discussions. News in the genre has been slow the past couple months, though.
I tried with !gamemusic@lemm.ee. As a general rule, I'll prioritize posting content to smaller instances, and I picked out that community on my home instance to do so, but I think it's just not happening. I'm moving over to !vgmusic@lemmy.world.
I'm also glad !houseplants@mander.xyz is doing well. Seems like they've got a good plan going on over there, with relevant stickies, a useful sidebar, and link exchange.
I started to post recently to !linux@programming.dev, good activity over there (after all, it's Linux on Lemmy), other people have started posting there too
Kinda happy how at the start of the season !bicycle_touring@lemmy.world got a bit of traffic. But i'm not all that hopeful really because the regular bicycling subs with way more subscribers have also very little traffic. I sometimes wonder if all that even makes sense here if it isn't about computers, memes or politics.
The camping, ultralight, outdoor communities are pretty much just dead.
Kinda happy how at the start of the season !bicycle_touring@lemmy.world got a bit of traffic. But i’m not all that hopeful really because the regular bicycling subs with way more subscribers have also very little traffic.
Nice that you got a bit of traffic. Maybe it stays low because people interesting in bicycle touring aren't that much on Reddit, without even mentioning Lemmy?
The camping, ultralight, outdoor communities are pretty much just dead.
Can you please provide links? Should they maybe try to consolidate at first, to get more activity in one place?
Camping i think theoretically has some actual users, the solarpunkers seem to mostly repost stuff, not do or plan to do something. I don't think consolidation will do much.
Good activity on !movies@lemm.ee, thanks to post from @Emperor@feddit.uk and @UKFilmNerd@feddit.uk
Happy to have somewhere to post film news - I get a tonne in my feed but there are so many film communities I hadn't got round to figuring out which to commit to. You helped that choice along.
Still a bit frustrating to see that the moderation team on !movies@lemmy.world isn’t doing much with that place, but that’s life I guess
In the end, you can only worry about your own communities.
Yeah, I have a habit of sharing news that only really interests me. That's why I don't share everything I come across. A friend and I used to run a website together, and I got quite used to posting the latest film trailers and interesting news that I came across. Although sometimes I found it really hard to post news about films I didn't really care about. I had to write something to accompany the video.
Other people have had the same kind of treatment. I even discussed with the lemm.ee admin about this, and he told me that even though he understood I got upset, he didn't want to interfere with community moderation.
I've been trying to get a bit of life into !starwarsfigures@lemmy.world and !legostarwars@lemm.ee - Rome wasn't sacked in a day though and experience suggests bloody minded persistence is the key.
A couple weeks ago I started occasionally posting to !cyberpunk@lemmy.zip when the main daily poster said they were taking a week off. That worked out nicely. They were offline for a week again recently and I "filled in the gap" again with daily posting.
I was posting music links daily to !gothindustrial@lemmy.world last August but ran through my main playlist by March. I've been trying to post at least once a week since then.
On !fullmoviesonyoutube@lemm.ee the regular poster said they were out of content. A couple of us said we'd post, but personally I only have like 4-5 more posts worth of content.
!superbowl@lemmy.world is still doing ok, though not quite at its peak. I don't think new subs are going up by much these days. I have seen comments by a few new names, which is very nice to see. Overall comment levels are about the same. Upvotes seem steady, but not as high as they were around the new year. I do think the year end festivities really boosted things though.
I'm happy to be ahead of !opossums@lemmy.world again though (no offense, I love opossums too, but I want to be #1 wild animal sub!) and I look to be top of the 2nd page of communities overall, so even though I'm not doing quite as well as I perhaps feel I should be doing, I feel I can't complain too much.
I still get a few positive compliments each week and people are sharing their personal stories with owls, which is always nice to hear. As long as I know the content is making people happy, I feel it's worth the work.
I've enjoyed having a few things to share with the !digitalbioacoustics@lemmy.world community. I've gotten some great recommended reading materials from that group in return. Maybe I'll have to look into more collabs and get some cross promotion going.
It's hard, we probably made too many communities too quickly lol. But then again if you have a topic you're obsessed about then it's nice to have somewhere to post without worrying about spamming. Like I can't just endlessly post things about The 7th Guest or Deus Ex Randomizer to a normal games community, but spamming my own communities I do get some upvotes so I guess some people enjoy these posts.
I feel like people have been conditioned by Reddit to be hesitant about making posts. There's no reason for posting to have a high barrier of entry. Maybe we need to be more willing to post things, like people chatting in Discord.
And comments too, especially comments in old posts, Lemmy handles it way better than Reddit so feel free to drop comments in year old posts lol. Occasionally sort your feed by "New Comments" or "Active". I have a widget on my phone's home screen that shows my Subscribed feed sorted by New Comments. It was fun with old school forums and it's still fun on Lemmy.
Trying my best to keep casual HistoryLemmy alive. Sometimes I get contributors with great stuff in HistoryPorn, but I'm almost entirely alone in HistoryArtifacts, HistoryIllustrations, HistoryRuins, and HistoryMemes.
Drive by negativity for niche communities can have a outsized chilling effect, moderation tools to help the smaller discussions grow would be useful here too.
If a smaller community has people who don't like it, they can turn that small community into a place to be negative about what that community is trying to be.
So when people want to talk about that community, they go into the post, and they see negativity, and they're less likely to participate. They don't want to deal with the negativity, they don't want to deal with the naysayers
I'm pretty comfy and nappy on my two kbin / mbin magazines ( @fakemon@fedia.io and @pokemonfanfiction@fedia.io ), waiting for people to arrive. Yeah, unfortunately they are like three or four layers deep within "niche of a niche of a niche of..." but what'ya gonna do? it's the stuff that interests me that doesn't already have tons of people going about it already (hi, Linux communities!).
I know there are a few generic Pokémon communities on lemmy. !pokemon@lemmy.ml is the one I see more content in but 80% of the time is just news announcements. We do have !pokemon@lemm.ee at home, too! And there's communities for Pokémon on both kbin.social and lemmy.world but they seem to be having federation issues (or I am), as I can't see full threads / posts from most of my instances, instead having to visit them directly.