Asking this to the general audience because that’s a comment I’ve seen quite a lot recently.
So, let’s start with a list of communities that could be interesting to a wide audience, sorted by monthly active users (MAU), the most active being on top.
- !moviesandtv@lemmy.film (1.6k MAU)
- !casualconversation@lemmy.world (521 MAU)
- !personalfinance@lemmy.ml (453 MAU)
- !fiction@literature.cafe (140 MAU)
- !gardening@thegarden.land (133 MAU)
- !relationship_advice@lemmy.world (130 MAU)
- !recipes@lemmy.world (69 MAU)
- !parenting@lemmy.world (56 MAU)
- !skincareaddiction@sh.itjust.works (31 MAU)
- !longreads@sh.itjust.works (24 MAU)
- !malefashionadvice@lemmy.world (12 MAU)
- !femalefashionadvice@lemmy.world (9 MAU)
Those numbers may seem low, but remember that those are active users, who at least commented or posted in the last month. So even if you are afraid to be shouting to the abyss, there will be other people next to you to keep the ball rolling.
Also, please note that those communities are suffering from the current tedious discoverability of new content on Lemmy. I’m hoping to make them more popular with this post, as I’m sure those are topics that can interest a lot of people.
Another thing to keep in mind is that Lemmy cannot replace 18 years of content creation overnight. It will take time for those communities to grow to the same level of content and activity than there counterpart, but with a bit of time, we’ll get there.
In addition, there are a few places to look out for new communities.
The first place to look for is https://lemmyverse.net, but Lemmy.world communities are currently excluded for some reason (https://github.com/tgxn/lemmy-explorer/issues/139).
A second place is this community: !newcommunities@lemmy.world. People tend to promote their communities there, you can also ask for a community you are looking for.
Finally, !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl provides a daily report of communities becoming popular.
If you’re interested in gardening or ecology, the entire Solarpunk instance (slrpnk.net) is full of great munis for you:
!right2repair@discuss.tchncs.de
And I think the following is a comprehensive list of cycling munis:
Im waiting for niche instances like those dedicated to specific video games to take off. They exist right now but have approximately zero traffic
This doesn’t address your question directly OP, but something I’ve been doing here (as a sad former redditor of over a decade) is to relentlessly upvote anything I like or that contributes to communities I’m subscribed to. I was more of a lurker on reddit but I think if we can push more niche communities and posts into the “everything” feed this problem will hopefully resolve itself eventually through organic growth.
The biggest problem people run into is a lack of thier niche communities here, and that’s mostly due to a lack of overall numbers. Reddit, while a festering hellhole, still has that. I’d be thrilled to see that change one day, but it’s definitely gonna be a while.
I really wanted to be a part of CasualConversation on here, but my posts and comments aren’t submitting. Not sure if it’s a glitch or if it’s an intended effect of the federation thing.
Okay, I just noticed we don’t allow English as a language, could you please give it another try?
It should be fine from a federation perspective because this person commented from Lemm.ee: https://lemm.ee/comment/2814981
It’s working now. And you’re right, it’s the English thing.
Great list!
