Like others, I came over when Reddit was banning 3rd party apps. Many communities were being started and I wanted to help. So I chose one community to form here and try and grow. And we did! There was a time a short while in the little KC Chiefs community was in the top 100 communities on Lemmy world. I knew that wouldn’t last that we would be outpaced by many more broad appeal communities but I didn’t predict the reverse in engagement growth that has come. Stagnation sure, I didn’t think Lemmy was going to surpass reddit for a long while yet, but not the barren communities of today. Meme communities and the “small gripe” adjacent communities are doing fine, but it seems all others have shrunk. I tried to keep the Kerbal Space Program community active for a bit but had to return to the official forums and even subreddit for discussion. The post I made in the Go community here remains the only post in the community.
A platform led by a CEO who edits comments of users, lies about other professionals and then double downs on the lie when proven to be a liar can’t be trusted. And in general I prefer the decentralized open source backbone of Lemmy to the ad ridden, rage bait and bug filled Reddit. I’d love for this to be my full time home for discussing my niche interests but that’s not possible without others engaging with the content.
I posted a lot in the beginning, tried to comment a lot too but now it feels like talking to myself when I make a new post in the community I started and get few or no responses. What can be done? Community specific advice is nice, but I’m looking more for Lemmy World level solutions as I’m sure there’s many many other niche communities I’m not apart of experiencing the same thing.
I appreciate all you admins here, I really do. Far more transparent than from Reddit and you do it all without making profit.
The pinned post to Lemmy World sounded like (to me) that you recognize a lot of people signed up, made communities, and then have abandoned Lemmy leaving a lot of ghost communities that you all want to clean up. Totally understandable, especially with all the legal considerations about leaving online spaces unmoderated.
It just got me thinking about how Lemmy has changed, and how I really want it to succeed. I can try and follow this suggestion, but I almost feel like for a lot of the more niche interests, Lemmy will sort of just be in a holding mode until Reddit inevitably fumbles the ball again leading to a new migration, this time with a more clear destination.
Hey! I appreciate your input and totally agree🙂it’s not an easy process and we don’t expect it to happen too quickly, but we do believe that this platform will make it. And we’re trying to build a culture of transparency, kindness and support, which is made very achievable by amazing people like you!