I’m going from:
I saw this post on another instance and tried to reply this exact message but got an error saying I couldn’t.
And suspect they were doing something like browsing Lemmy.ml / all while not logged in and saw it but couldn’t interact with it until they came back to lemmy.world where it was easy to find and interact with.
There is some friction of finding posts from federated content on your own instance, but you will note that I am posting from (and see this on) programming.dev rather than lemmy.world (where this community is hosted).
You need to be logged into your instance, search for the post on your instance, browse it via search, and then you can interact with it there. You don’t need to create an account on the other instance to interact with it.
And yes, that list of steps mentioned above is a lot of friction.
Links are also slightly awkward needing the full path in order to navigate to it on the instance you are signed into… and the editor appears to do it wrong when you let it. The link !programming@programming.dev should let you navigate there, join, comment and vote on a community hosted on another instance.
Private slack channels work, but the reduced access to archives now makes that less useful. Spinning up a Zulip instance for family and then using that is quite tempting.
For most non-tech type people, the active asynchronous chat is an easier thing to work with than threaded discussions. And sharing images tends to be something more ephemeral / point in time. You could have a thread in zulip for “Smith Family vacation photos - summer 2023” and then follow that… but the "do you really want to be digging through those a year or two later? They’re still there, but how do you want them?
The other part is the… reduced moderation. Having worked with Stack Overflow Teams, the college intern thinking it’s funny to down vote everyone’s posts… well, that’s not funny. Cousin Charlie doing the same on a family Lemmy can create much more drama than you’d want to administer… and Aunt Jane thinks that it’s just boys being boys and doesn’t see anything wrong with it. Family drama is the worst drama.
This is why the least feature rich system that you need would work best. It’s just chat. No votes, no reporting and minimal administration and moderation because you really don’t want to deal with that.
Do you need the persistence? threading? federation? Or would spinning up an instance of Zulip ( https://zulip.com ) with only your family as provisioned accounts on it work better?
Reddit cat subs are tightly knit with people suggesting other related subs for some content. Being able to say “aww, cute angry black cat - this would fit on /r/stealthbombers” that sort of interconnection is difficult on Lemmy making the tangent discovery, reposting and niche cat subs more difficult.
Without the fairly consistent cross posting (and thus part of the discovery), such niche subs are going to be harder to grow a community for.
It might be a bit more feasible if there was a “cats and only cats” lemmy instance where all things cats are posted (compare programming.dev and startrek.website which are two single topic instances and browsing communities on each makes targeted discovery more feasible).
The other part is that those niche cat subs are filled with “normal” people. There usage stats show most people used new.reddit.com or the official mobile app - even before the api changes. Most of those people didn’t leave Reddit (with the exception of a few mods where /r/cathostage is restricted but /r/cathostages which was created in response has even more activity).
This also gets to a “there aren’t enough fun things on Lemmy”. The flairs of /r/cathostages are fun.
If you look at /r/leagalcatadvice you will see that most of its activity is from crossposted (not by original poster either) into the sub and then people are having fun there.
The software supporting fun (flairs, easy cross posting) and culture are currently working against Lemmy for niche cat subs. Consider that !cat@lemmy.world has 84 users per day and fewer posts per day than /r/oneorangebraincell - it might not be able to support the range of niche cat subs that Reddit is able to.
I’d also point out that Lemmy’s 40,000 active users and 400k total accounts is comparable to the subscriber base of /r/oneorangebraincell that shows 442k accounts… just for pictures of orange cats that share the one brain cell.
There are 50,000 active accounts.
Individuals who are active on multiple accounts (having accounts on multiple sites) count multiple times.
Another thought is the two parts of locking it down.
How much local configuration would it take to make it so that Lemmy doesn’t show any posts to someone not logged in (since you know that if its on the web even under a really funky hard to type name… someone will find it)? Do you want your vacation planning available to everyone (“I won’t be home from September 15th through the 23rd, so Cousin Dave is going to stop by each day to walk the dog…”)
The other part is specifically against fediverse (which would be the reason for Lemmy rather than some other system) for such a private community. It again gets hard to lock down… not so much a “what gets out” but also a “what gets in”. … oh, Aunt Jane and Uncle John have subscribed to swingers that’s hosted on a nswf instance and that’s not about playground equipment. Meanwhile Aunt Dorthy wants you to do something to prevent Cousin Charlie from seeing all that “stuff” in /all before Carlie accidentally calls him Uncle Long John at a family gathering. … and now you’re going through pics and finding pictures of your aunt and uncle that you really didn’t want to see (and you’re going to be going vegan before you want to think about that turkey baster next Thanksgiving).
And while these are solvable problems… it’s a question of do you want to solve them?
Simpler solutions will work better that you expand into other things as the need arises.