How do I create a community on Sync? Can't find a button for that.

Thanks! I'm currently going through my hobbies and I'm gonna start posting and subbing to all of them.

You're right, I should be posting more if I want engagement.

This is the lifecycle of internet forums

"I'm sick of this place, I'm going somewhere new!" > "This place is deserted" > "Let's diversify and get more users" > "There are more users but they are all posting content I'm not interested in" > "I'm sick of this place, I'm going somewhere new!"

I've been through at least half a dozen such cycles, it's just a normal part of life when you live vicariously through an ethernet cable. Lemmy will grow, get old, go to shit, and die, and half the population will move somewhere else. Probably Pylon.

Then post into the void until some other like-minded degenerate finds you. You need to create the meeting point!

The thing is, communities need people. People who post in the community. Most new communities get a few members, a handful of posts, and then just die.

Like you've been shown that there's no simple answer over and over again here, but one problem I face hasn't been mentioned. What if I want to subscribe to communities that I can't participate in? Not every community is about hobbies, some is people talking about their life which is totally unlike mine and I like to read that. One I always pick as an example is r/arrangedmarriage. I love(d) reading that subreddit to explore a world that is so foreign to me. I'm a white woman from Europe as far removed from marriage as one could be on this earth. Why should someone follow an c/arrangedmarriage I of all people created and mod? Not everyone joins niche communities because they are directly relevant to their life.

Making the community doesn't mean it has any activity. There's tons of communities already made for a bunch of niche topics. None of them are being posted in. There's also communities that aren't niches that also lack activity.

[email protected] only has about 3 active users, not including myself. The DLC is still pretty new and it's a massively popular game.

"Why complain about lacking a community when you can create your own ghost town"

You just reminded me to post in this new community I joined recently, so thank you.

This did remind me to create a community for the one subreddit I used the most before I left reddit, r/jakeandamir. Thank you, I did that today!

Maybe the answer is a better search engine to find the communities.

I will not whine about the lack of this niche community, because both c/Indiana and c/[email protected] exist, but boy do I wish they were even close to as active as r/Indiana was when I was on Reddit.

There is just not a good place to discuss state politics that I can find and I learned a lot through discussion.

Can't wait for 0 people to join my Haibane Renmei community that I don't have the experience or patience to mod, nor the understanding of the source material to justify creating it in the first place

ETA: I just searched, and found out one person already has made a Haibane Renmei community. It has one subscriber, the person who made it, who has been inactive since 2022. There are some things that simply can't be replicated in a smaller platform.

The problem is that the niche community exist. In fact it probably exists several times, one in each instance with a small number of followers. Which makes really hard to go and decide in which community you want to invest.

It's one fundamental problem of federative systems and to be solved some of the federal nature need to be partially given away, but I think is necessary. I propose two solutions:

1. Automatic merging of communities. All communities with the same name within a federation are de facto replicated. So a post in any community just replicate in all. It will make it seem like there's only one community.

2 Discourage. Everytime you try to create a community that already exists in other instance a pop up appears that encourage you to just go to the other community. For already duplicated communities messages are sent to concentrate in the biggest one.

For someone whose major gripe is whining you sure seem to do a lot of it.

I take offense to it because you're suggesting that the problem is us, and not the system which resulted in empty communities

I did. There's almost zero engagement. My most popular thread is a meta narrative about me being in there talking to myself. There were at least two other attempts that are even more inactive. Not enough of y'all are into synthesizers.

https://lemm.ee/c/synthesizers

I don't think there are any" rant" communities?

Lemmy needs that kind of large general topic community to redirect users to smaller niches communities.

I too also wouldn't want to mod it, but I think it'd be great for herding up angry lemmy users sharing the same frustrations, so they could be redirected or start new communities for the particular topic.

The reason is that everyone enjoy reading and writing rants about something, so the rant community will automatically grow many subscribers coming in from all kinds of searches.

For example, a user ranting about "womens pants without pockets" would get much more engagement than someone just creating and posting about a community for womens pants. The rant comment section would also already often include the potential users for a new community.

The general discussion doesn't really cut it, because it's too nice and polite and weird angry rants don't really fit in there.

The thing is that (also in real life) when someone needs something bad enough, they'll get angry, and that anger can be channeled into something useful, because they're willing to collaborate with others who can help them or who at least supports them.

I keep looking where on my local ATM machine that I can exchange internet points to ducats

doubloons would be acceptable likewise as well

As a man whose started 7 different communities I'd like to defend those people saying, if you don't immediately get a good response it starts feeling like screaming into the void.

I started a meme community [email protected] and it immediately took off and is doing well. On the other hand other my worst community got 2-3 people making one or two comments after a month of 2 posts everyday.

Meme communities do well. Niche communities require lots of people finding it and being active.

This is kind of bullshit. On a big platform, like Reddit, where there are orders of magnitude more users, the likelihood is that there are a good number of people interested in whatever niche topic you want. That's a draw for a lot of people. I left Reddit for Lemmy for good, but we're just not up to that kind of user base.

And it's not zero effort to get a community going and keep it active, especially with a small user base. It's perfectly reasonable for someone to want a place that discusses their niche interest without wanting to be responsible for running that place. It doesn't make them bad or lazy.

I see this response all the time "create your own if you want to see niche communities and Reddit communities migrate here." Well, if I have the bloody time to moderate, or even if I do, will there be many people? And if there are many people, do I have the time to moderate? What if there are mod bickering and drama?

The question is time. Does anyone else have the time to moderate and put up with BS inevitable with most communities?