I’ll go first. I wish Lemmy communities existed for: destroyed tanks. Ukraine War video report. sopranos duckposting. benzodiazepines.
I will comment more as I think of them.
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.
We’re definitely smaller than the Reddit gunpla sub, but I’m really enjoying the gunpla community on lemmy. Everyone’s chummy and welcoming. I’d love to see any you’ve built!
A 90dayfiance community. Also a local community that posted more than once a week.
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.
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.
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.
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 couldn’t 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.
This is a good point. Reddit originally had no communities. Then there were maybe a dozen, all picked by the admins… and already /r/Atheism was one of them, because that’s how the userbase went. People who don’t understand why such a community was necessary do not remember living through 90s / 00s American culture.
oh, I would also really like a Law & Order community.
Yes please
more music related subs, like bluegrass, old time, etc. and active users to go in them.
Pathfinder_Kingmaker. I spent ages talking about builds and strategies on that reddit sub. I still miss guiding new players into the games. The BG3 community is the closest I’ve found but it doesn’t scratch quite the same itch due to 5e’s simplicity.
Pathfinder does have a few active communities but they are all for the tabletop. The one for the game on Lemmy.world is dead as a doornail.
InfoWarriorRides / SchizophreniaRides, for pictures of cars with batshit crazy messages on them.
100YearsAgo could be mirrored here via bot and not miss much.
Other subs were great for their discussion more than than linked content - Civvie11, GunnerkriggCourt, DresdenCodak, QContent. Not so much DumbingOfAge because it devolved into a hatedom sub. I guess most of that should be lumped into comic and game-video communities. I could “be the change” and start posting speedruns willy-nilly.
LinkIsCute is here but pretty dead.
Polandball, holy shit!
Tits sub
Ass sub
Resident evil sub
Lonely sub
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.
visiting a neat-sounding community and realizing all the posts are by the single moderator (and are getting less and less frequent).
This will be a key moment towards Lemmy’s growth or decline. Especially in non-tech/meme/politics communities, it’s so easy for the only poster be a single person who is posting daily, and who then simply runs out of content. Maybe the solution is for each frequent poster to post non-daily on several different communities. Anyway, check out !fedigrow@lemm.ee, @Blaze@reddthat.com has started posting a weekly thread on “How is your niche community doing?”
I’ll check it out, thanks!
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.
I think one other thing that might help would be to adjust the “Active” sort. I believe it has some kind of hard-coded 2 day limit? So posts older than 2 days will not show up. The problem is that as the sort is working right now, it often displays posts that are 2 days old. This isn’t great for getting new content. It’d be nice if the “Active” sort (or any other other sorts) parameters could be configured somehow.
The active, hot, and scaled sort have that two day bump limit, but active uses the newest comment time for it’s algorithm, whereas hot uses the post creation time.
So the hot sort is better for new trending content, and active is better for topics with new comments.
active uses the newest comment time
I think this is what I don’t like about active sort. Just a single comment is all it needs to bump a highly upvoted post to the top. I feel like it should rather look at an aggregate of recent comments or something along those lines, so that a single comment doesn’t cause such a big effect. It’s kinda like if a single vote could move a post to the top.
Hot and Scaled are my main sorts. I alternate a couple of times a day. They get me the most interesting content.
I only check the first 3 pages of Active twice per day.
Edit: New is once per week and I generally regret it.
i wish a lemmy community existed like r/wordington with unhinged content. And more communities dedicated to games, which are active like a Terraria community for instance.
I really want there to be a community for Dropout as I love their content but I haven’t found a good space to talk with others about them that doesn’t involve some corporation harvesting my data.
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.
/Factorio
I wish Voyager would copy links in this format as I’m too lazy.
Maybe I’ll write a bot when I’m less lazy.
/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.
An active box office community. I don’t really watch movies but I enjoy the data and the discussions about why movies are performing that way. @ClarkZuckerberg@lemmy.world tried to singlehandedly keep it afloat for some time, but it didn’t work unfortunately.
I imagine it’s like sports statistics but with a lower barrier of entry, and sometimes you watch a film franchise you enjoyed die in real time.
