there’s no communities for my niche interests!!!
more like “i want a ready-made community where other people already putting effort into posting cool and intersting stuff, and all I want to do is sit on my ass and shower posts generously with “”“muh upvotes™””“”
During the initial mass migration from Reddit I got the impression a lot of people were starting communities on Lemmy that had been successful on Reddit but put no effort into them. I’ll bet there is a statistic yet to be figured out that says you need a million platform members before you can have enough members to sustain a niche community like c/gothcountry.
Problem is that Reddit won’t let people talk about alternatives, so it’s difficult to tell people about it. Lemmy also does not lend itself to following links if you’re not logged into that instance. So if you find a link to a community on a different instance you can’t comment or engage with it unless you go back through your own instance.
You can with ! links:
You can also paste a post link in your search bar to find it in your own instance
Even those that did, remain invisible. This link doesn’t work /c/books
Until the link /c/books shows any user, with only one click, the aggregate of all “books” communities in a single place, without subscribing or even logging in. Then lemmy will stagnate because it is failing to live up to its promise of federated decentralization
Both Mbin and PieFed have “categories”, so that you don’t need to search for and find communities at all - you can simply join like “memes”, underneath “Chillin”, and it’ll show all of them. You can fine-tune further, but hunting through All can be a thing of the past. So… it’s happening, not in Lemmy per se (yet) but in the wider Fediverse it’s already here. See it yourself in action at e.g. https://piefed.social/ (3 horizontal bars -> Topics).
Interesting, thanks I will check those out!