Im joining in on the reddit ditching thing, and was kinda worried at first that i wouldnt be able to like use it the way i did reddit as it feels like a whole new place, but after engaging with posts and people and actually being a part of lemmy rather than being lurk mode all the time i was pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to become a member of the community, theres a reasonable amount of subs (or whatever the other word for em is) that fit my interests, enough linux content and shitposting for my liking, and the overall random posts made by people equally fed up with Leddit. (also i admit i used reddit a little cus there was this post on the fedora sub showing how to fix a sound issue i been having after a recent update)
So, there’s 2 separate issues colliding here:
Nobody atm knows what the hell they’re doing, what their instance will eventually become, what communities will die or survive. Beehaw (your server) is the best situated for this. They tightly control the new communities made, and will only make a new one if absolutely necessary. There’s gonna be a lot of single user communities in a week. People simply don’t get that you can’t just create a super niche community of /c/PeopleWhoPlayMySuperSpecificHouseruleSystemBasedOnGURPSv1987 and summon users from the void.
/r/Tech, /r/Technology, /r/Computing, and /r/TechNews. Which of these is the “real” technology subreddit? Should we close down the other three? Some amount of dispersion is natural and normal. A user can just subscribe to all of them if they really want. Reddit is far more fragmented than you might realize.
How do you think niche communities will succeed? Will they be more successful in more populated servers? Like should a Monster Hunter community be made in a server dedicated to gaming? Hoping this makes sense, I’m still trying to understand how it all works.
There’s no rulebook, it depends on how the community wants to do it.
Take my thinking here with an EXTREME grain of salt. This is just me, and how this place would work in an ideal scenario in my head. I have no control over what people want to do, how they want to structure their own instances, anything like that. With all that pre-amble out of the way:
An instance should contain people that are generally on the same page. Maybe one instance is more techy, another more social activists, another more art & literature, and we’ve already seen that language-specific regional instances are doing well. They should maintain enough diversity that they don’t become echo chambers or cliquey. They all have their own rules, and enforce them on their own users and visitors to their communities.
The communities on a particular instance should play to the strengths of their users. The communities should reflect the general vibe of the users. Users will, naturally, have more interests than their instance provides for and pull in stuff from other instances. In a sense, your instance and the communities in it are your home street, where you know most of the active users, and the others are the big city, where you go to get things you can’t on your street.
Thanks for this, it actually helped a lot! I think I’m finally starting to figure things out lol. I do really like this idea though, as I think it’ll lead to a lot less friction in various communities than Reddit had, where fighting in the comments was just commonplace. Either way I’m excited to see how things progress!
And thank you again, I really appreciate it!
No problem, happy to help. Oh, and just to reinforce the whole instances as home street, I already have some expectations & stereotypes about beehaw users: Goody two-shoes, but great to talk to :P
Feel free to shoot me any more questions. I’m feeling very contemplative, although that might just be the beer talking.
Thank you so much for your reply. It makes sense and I agree with you. I guess in the end the community on an arbitrary instance might win out as the main one for each niche hobby, so that most talk will happen there, with others as alternatives. I’m really looking forward to the experience of getting used to this and getting it up and running.
I think a good example are the /r/gaming and /r/games subreddits.
/r/gaming is a default subreddit so it has a lot of traffic from users (37 million) of all different backgrounds that may not mesh nicely with the actual hardcore gaming community.
/r/games is not a default, users (3 million) need to seek it out. It generally is more civil and encourages good discussions.
Something like this can be done where !gaming@lemmy.ml could have a different user base and feel than !gaming@beehaw.org , or even !gaming@feddit.de which could be specific to the German gaming community.