Probably an unpopular viewpoint, but Lemmy and Mastodon proponents need to suck it up and go be on Reddit and Twitter now and then just to advertise lemmy and mastodon. If no one is talking about these platforms there, no one will be thinking about migrating here. I went to Reddit for some specific emulation communities a day or so ago, and people there are asking where they can find piracy communities that don’t get banned, and it was appreciated when I mentioned you can find them here. Lemmy just isn’t talked about and given exposure unless someone already on lemmy makes the effort, and talking about it here constantly doesn’t make any difference.

IMO, where lemmy is right now. Niche communities are counter productive. Especially as there is often 3 times the same niche communities on 3 different instances.

Try to talk about your niche content in a larger community. Talk about Oshi no ko in a generic manga/anime community. Try to talk about Kult RPG in a generic rpg community. Talk about french politics in a general France/Europe community.

Today we have generic community with like 10 posts a day and under them a bunch of niches with a post per week. Uf you move these posts to the general community above you now get 15 posts a day.

Content is what drags users, not yet another niche community.

Lemmy is still on the verge of usability, there is few very engaged user who make a large fraction of the content. Keeping it alive, but if in 6 month they have less time some /c will deperish

Once scaled sort arrives on Lemmy, smaller communities will be ranked higher and not knocked out by the meme communities and stuff like that.

part of the reason why some communities stick and some dont is because the type of people who were willing to jump to lemmy. Users who jumped to lemmy generally were more tech forward, privacy forward, or was part of some ostracized community not very welcome on reddit, as the typical casual user does not care for site politics.

its really hard to start a small community with one main poster, and requires a few to get the ball rolling. its a game of converting those in the niche communities to make the jump

I’m sole mod (not the original creator, but took over when they went awol) for the knitting community at !knitting@lemmy.world, and I do my best to contribute a lot to the cross stitch & embroidery one at !lemmy_stitch@sh.itjust.works too. This is coming from a history of running various niche online groups. So a few things I would advise:

• First, just accept that some topics are too niche. They were too niche for Reddit as well, at one point. People got overexcited and wanted to mark their territory by setting up a ton of communities when they were new to Lemmy, but reality doesn’t work that way and a lot of those spaces just aren’t needed. We’d be better served combining posts from these into slightly more general combined communities, and perhaps leaving a sticky post in the tiny niche ones letting everyone know where to head to for that topic.

But if your topic is big enough to in theory get decent traction:

• Be grateful for what users you do have. You said you sometimes get “few” replies, so make sure you’re getting to know those people and replying to them and continuing the conversation where appropriate. You don’t need a lot of users, you just need a few engaged ones to make for a nice community.

• Recruit your friends. You’re a Chiefs fan, you probably know other Chiefs fans. Get them interested.

• Drop your community link wherever its relevant. People don’t like having to put effort into finding new communities but if they just happen to come across mention of it, they’ll click. Obviously I’m not saying spam, but there are plenty of sports fans here and it’s bound to come up in conversation.

• Crosspost. Any posts you make to a Chiefs community are probably also relevant to the wider NFL communities or maybe fantasy football players. And again this just gives more people the chance to stumble across the fact that you exist.

Ok these next couple are more involved, but they do work well!

• Consider Mastodon. I have a craft-focused account there too, and if I have a question about knitting or cross stitch or whatever then the more answers I can get the better, right? So I use the fact that we can post from Mastodon, to a Lemmy community, combining the replies from both audiences in one thread. Example of what I mean here.

• Create value. Could be by posting pillar content that’s actually useful (in your case could be some kind of statistical analysis, we all know the football nerds love it, but whatever will be long-term useful / interesting to your audience). Or it could be a regular community event or something ("predict the Chiefs wins/losses for the upcoming season and win something, etc etc).

• Ask your existing users what they’d like to see from the community. Some things you try will hit and some will miss, but getting feedback is going to up your chances!

That’s everything off the top of my head and it’s already a wall of text so I’ll stop there. It is absolutely difficult to be a mod, it can be a lot of work to get to the point of just having an active community that doesn’t need your input to keep rolling. But if your community see you trying, I think that goes a long way. Hope some of this was helpful!

There are a few niche communities that are doing well here. The Trekkies that meme over at risa, the NCD crowd and their Military-Industrial Complex fetish, and the meme community in general is fairly healthy and active.

But I agree with you that there isn’t that critical mass that Reddit has that allows organic niche growth to occur. We’re simply too small. Even small Reddit communities like /r/Kenshi (131k) or /r/Factorio (347k) have more subscribers than the entirety of all Lemmy instances (60k). It’s impossible to compete when there is such a mismatch of scale, especially against behemoths like /r/funny with subscriber bases in the millions.

What can we do? Just keep making this place our home. Post interesting things you find on the Internet, copypasta memes, that sort of stuff. I don’t know if it’ll grow it but if enough of us do this it won’t stagnate.

Here’s some things Lemmy could potentially implement:

• a default sort that favors smaller communities
• better onboarding for new users that guides them into discovering new communities
• giving recommendations to other similar communities

I would suggest we add community nesting. It would allow people to easier find new communities and post in small communities without risking that no-one sees it

Anyone that was around while Reddit was growing will remember that there were few subreddits to begin with. I think fediverse needs that to happen before expanding.

I don’t know how to fix it. Maybe sub-feddits need to be pruned if they aren’t thriving. Maybe tags in titles would be more helpful until they have enough content to warrant their on category.

I think it’s the same as any other platform. Right now the content in small communities is limited, but over time once there is a sizable amount of content that newcomers can get referred from or go through, Lemmy as a whole will get more traction. Since the Reddit exodus happened I definitely feel like Lemmy has grown a lot and I’m here for the long run.

I really just think the reddit/lemmy structure isn’t very suited to small communities.

For small communities we should have a platform structured like a traditional web forum with flat threads and thread bumping. This causes people to get endless streams of discussion even with relatively few users.

I saw a bunch of posts from @rglullis@communick.news promoting a project called fediverser which at first i thought was just like lemmit didn’t see the need for it. The main difference is that not just posts are imported into Lemmy, but also the comments. The idea is that for each reddit user who comments, that comment is added to a shadow profile in Lemmy and commented on the post. The idea being over time, the reddit users will have profiles in Lemmy already populated, that they can take ownership of, and don’t have to start from scratch finding an instance or creating an account.

Obviously everyone has their opinions of it, but maybe it’d work out for the Kerbal Space Program community, since Lemmy is more technically focused. This might remove a barrier of entry for new users joining your communities.