I never was a big social media guy. Never had a Facebook or anything, except what google forced on me like Google+ and on reddit, I just used it for very specific tasks, when I couldn’t find answers anywhere else.
With the current shitstorm on reddit I decided that enough is enough and wanted to give this Fediverse I keep hearing about a try. With a little bit of searching around, I made an account, got the mobile app and things seemed settled. Until I tried finding stuff more targeted than a wall of posts on jerbil.
Granted, I haven’t read, let alone tried everything yet, but it seems limited, or most likely, I have no idea what I’m doing. Take for example emulation. One of the subreddits I was in, was about emulation since that’s a topic I’m passionate about. Good, went to the link provided to search for communities and got 11 results. As expected for the most part.
What was not expected was most of them being in the double digits of users with the biggest ones showing 3 posts and like…6 comments total.
I know that while the fediverse is not new by any means, there’s a large growth now with the shit happening over at reddit and is in by no means as populated or interacted with as the latter. But those numbers seem so small to me that I’m sure I’m doing something wrong.
Please help out an illiterate idiot?
PS. Emulation was just an example I was interested with. It’s not the point of my post.
Not wanting to spam by replying to every post, this one is an answer to both TheOneCurly and solarvector. It seems I also figure out how to tag, yey me.
So you’re both saying that this is normal and not something I’m doing wrong, right? In that case, that’s fine with me, I can wait and totally understand the lack of numbers, I just assumed that even before reddit decided to fold over, there’d be some stuff around, even on niche communities. I wasn’t expecting a huge amount of content or discussions, but in the example given, there’s not even news posts about updates on software etc.
I’ll keep looking around. Seems interesting as a concept so far and I’m much more willing to spend time in lemmy compared to reddit or twitter or whatever gets plastered on my screen daily without my consent that I have to go out of my way to not interact with.
The more niche your interest, the slower it will be to build content. Certainly the most popular communities are already overflowing with content, while others have no home yet. But it’s all growing, and quickly. When LemmyNsfw launched, the only communities were the very obvious and popular ones. Those are now filled with a bunch of content, and more coming in constantly. But what’s more interesting is some of the more…ahem niche communities that have sprung up there, and are now showing signs of life.
There are sites like sub.rehab that can help you find where your content has moved. Not all of them are in the fediverse, either. But you may need to lump some of it into broader categories until interest grows. For instance, emulation might be covered under piracy, or one of the other subs on FMHY or DBZero. It won’t be exact, but it might be close enough.
You can also start your own community if you think there will be interest. Just be sure to prime the pump with some content right away to bring people in.
I’ll keep that in mind and wait. And if say a month from now things look the same on the subjects I’m interested in, I might give it a try at building something or most likely start posting stuff on existing but slow communities. At the very least, covering news wouldn’t be that hard and even if there’s no interest I can still use it as a personal repository later down the line.
I’ve also found that searching out more broadly focused communities helps. For example /c/retrogaming has emulation content, in addition to people with old hardware.
There’s something kind of refreshing about having to go out of your way to find content, rather than going out of your way to avoid it. It reminds me of the earlier days of the web with random geocities sites, forums, webrings.
But yeah even considering that it still feels kinda barren around here. I don’t think Lemmy was used much at all before the Reddit exodus - it’s still pretty new and heavy in development, and I don’t think was even really usable until recently. As many issues as it’s had supporting the massive influx of users, it’s lucky that it’s usable enough as a Reddit alternative with all the stuff going down over there.
Anyway, welcome aboard! Hopefully we can get things going soon enough :) I’ve only been around a few days but everything I’ve posted has gotten more attention and thoughtful responses than they would elsewhere, even with how small the communities are - I think once people see how much more rewarding it is to contribute here activity will start to snowball.