Lemmy

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How specific communities should be? (feddit.it)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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On Reddit there are very specific and helpful communities, personally I often look up on communities about Adobe softwares. What if I wanted to create specific communities on Lemmy? Ideally I’d creare an Indesign community, but do you think it would be better to keep it more general, something like Graphic design or Adobe, since Lemmy is much smaller then Reddit?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I've had this discussion before and the conclusion was:

Keep it as general as possible. Lemmy is still growing and small and a niche community looks often dead.

Once the community becomes too big it's easier to split the community into more specific communities.

For example: we have quite a few communities about learning a specific language and they all seem inactive, so we are keeping a general community up ([email protected]) but don't limit the content to anything specific. You can ask generally about languages, learning, or a specific language and you are more likely to get an answer from others than if you go to a language specific community.

Once it's too big it will be easy for an active group of people to move to, say, [email protected] or something.

So, in short: start with a general community :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Yup, it's easy to make a more specific community if the interest is there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

True, and also it will make it feel less like "lemmy is dead" to new comers (something we have heard time and time again from people who are new to the fediverse) because they accidentally found the one community that was dead. It's easier to point them to "our version" of a community they are looking for.

Even in moderately popular communities the posting frequency is quite low compared to what some people are used to. For me personally I actually like the activity level of lemmy, but we need more people to account for comings and goings of users to be able to sustain communities on the long run.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

Yup, just slap it in the sidebar as a "related community."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

If a community is too specific then it won't gain traction. I think definitely keep it as general as you can, like just a graphic design community (if there isn't already one)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The more specific you make a community, the fewer users you will have. And Lemmy is not very big.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago

The broader you make a community, harder it will be to feel like you can make a very specific question and it will also be harder to find so we will never have niche content

Pick your poison, I’d go for the slow but steady usefulness