Mostly just curious, How come people can’t create their own communities here? What was the reasoning behind this? I’d love it if people could create their own communities and appeal to tiny niches. (i know I can find most of them via federation but some I can’t)
this is a conscious choice specifically to prevent hundreds of tiny communities which appeal to tiny niches and don’t get used; you can see more of the rationale here. if there’s an interest in creating a new community though that’d be used actively, we are not opposed to adding that (our most recent additions, the FOSS and DIY communities, were requested this way)
I’ve been thinking about this comment a lot since I came to beehaw a few days ago. I’ve been wanting to start a “Does anyone have a borderline obsessive hobby around coffee, tea, or smoothies?” where I could geek out with my fellow coffee-and-coffee-adjacent enthusiasts, without annoying everyone reading /c/Chat or whatever, but I couldn’t find anything around the… “cafe” niche, I guess? So I just kept it to myself rather than oversharing stuff nobody else cares about.
It’s super difficult for me to come anywhere near something that might inconvenience a ton of people, so I’m not apt to share stuff without a clear-cut very focused niche - even in the /c/DIY community I’m probably not going to share any woodworking because I don’t want to interrupt the bathroom renovators / bedazzlers out there. A lot of this is because of my own neurodivergency, but that’s kind of my point: finer grained communities help people like me finally feel confident we can be like “you know what? this is cool, and the people into this sort of thing will agree!”
Anyway, you’re being asked to balance two competing interests here and I get that that makes it super challenging; I just wanted to offer up a bit of a good-faith counter on why more communities than less can be a good thing - at least for some of us! :)
Thanks!
If you look at the server that I am on (feddit.de) then you’ll see the result of allowing everyone to make their own community. On reddit somehow a million empty subs don’t matter, but here they’re kinda annoying and all dead.
Still like this server a lot though :)
On reddit somehow a million empty subs don’t matter, but here they’re kinda annoying and all dead.
i’d say this mostly has to do with the fact that 1) reddit can paper over all of those very tiny subs with its huge, active ones that you’re likely to run into first; and 2) any sub on a topic people want to talk about will eventually find a community on reddit due to its size (but you can’t say that about here yet, where even general communities might struggle to find more than a few users)
Yeah I believe if lemmy had a larger user base it wouldn’t be a problem. Also I don’t really have an idea how to fix this problem. I like how beehaw handles it but I also like that there are servers where users can make their own communities without asking first.
I like the idea of servers allowing anyone to make their own community if they can give a plan on how it won’t end up dead.
I see, thanks!