If you recall reddits growth many of their communities evolved as offshoots of a single generic community. This made it easier for people to see discussions they normally would not get involved in, and once the posts in a similar category reached critical mass it moved to a sub Reddit.
I think people are recreating their niche communities here but they are floundering since the user base is still pretty small. Maybe it’s best to post to the “big” communities until the time is right to move to smaller, targeted communities?
I agree - there are plenty of empty magazines setup as subreddit clones. What we really need is a push encouraging content and comment submissions more than anything else. That’s what’s going to drive the development of a vibrant community on kbin.social.
Generally, unless you have at least 20 pieces of content from multiple users with active commentary, most folks will assume it’s a dead community and move on to a bigger community on lemmy.world or similar to find more content. One thing I would suggest for the moderators of growing communities is to always comment on, upvote and boost your contributors’ submissions in the beginning stages of community growth. Your personal engagement of the content is the first step in encouraging your readers to do the same.
That being said, I’d love for folks to create more new niche communities that didn’t exist on Reddit. There’s a lot more freedom here - we should take advantage of it.
I made a magazine on kbin as an alternative to a relatively niche subreddit I really appreciated. And in the month since the migration, it’s only grown more apparent that I was a bit over enthusiastic about the scope of that migration. Only 2, maybe 3, others have contributed to the magazine, and it’s usually a question I have no definitive answer for. Oddly enough, there are over 40 silent subscribers, so I’m probably doing something of interest to some people out there.
For better or worse, Kbin still doesn’t have the means to let you remove magazines you’ve created. So rather than deleting or abandoning it, I’ve kind of opted to take responsibility over it and treat it as more of a personal hobby and public repository for myself. Every once in a while I’ll post a tutorial for something I’ve done, or write out some thoughts of my own without any expectation of engagement. When the ability to delete magazines comes through, I might consider migrating my more useful contributions to one of the more centralized magazines at that point and then removing my own.
I was a mod of a small niche reddit sub for about six years. When I started working on it, there were only about 200 subscribers and it was a pretty quiet place. Over the time I managed it, I had to work the group to get them interested. I’d regularly post, comment and like whatever was happening. But at the same time, I’d do searches throughout reddit to look for like minded people and just let them know my sub existed. No big marketing push but just a little reminder that my sub existed. I’d set out private messages to people and connect with them … about half wouldn’t respond … a quarter would say they weren’t interested but about a quarter would say thanks and that they weren’t aware of the sub and would have a look.
After doing that for four or five years, I grew the sub from 200 members to 2,000.
I also learned that on any social media about 90 percent of users are just lurkers who like reading stuff, liking stuff and maybe once in a while commenting. It’s only about ten percent of the group that are active, comment, post new content or even create new content. The larger your group, the larger that ten percent becomes and the more content your group generates and the more activity happens.
Keep working it … it’s all up to you in the early stages, you have to put in the work to contact people, encourage them to join and talk and chat with your base to keep them engaged. You create the content or highlight new stuff or keep posting content you find and share to your group … all your users are there … they are the 90 percent, you are the ten percent right now.
As your group grows, eventually there will be one or two people that will be enthusiastic and they will help with content … then as the activity grows, there will be a few more active users who will post and comment regularly.
Your group will never suddenly one day jump to 10,000 users and your community becomes a hive of activity … it grows organically like a plant in your garden. Right now it is small and fragile and anything can bring it down … you not tending to it will mean it dies. But if you water it, tend to it, look after it eventually it will grow into something big and there will be many people that will come around to help you with this enormous garden or field of crops that have sprouted from your activity.
I will join plenty of niche groups, not because I have a specific interest in it myself but I enjoy seeing what others who do enjoy it have to say.
I myself have nothing to contribute but like seeing other peoples interest, not sure if that makes sense!
I mean, you’re right, but it’s pretty inevitable. There will be a natural wave of creations, inactivity and reclaimings that will take place over the coming couple of years.
For now though, this is wild west internet, so trying to control it would be similar to trying to herd cats with firecrackers.
That statement about herding cats will stay with me for a bit.
/Lights a cracker
