Fediverse

Here's something I learned, don't be afraid to block. Political sub you don't want? blocked. Person shouting about China in a cat sub? blocked.

Also add blacklisted keywords, it cuts down on politics a ton

Post the kind of content you’d like to see.

Someone has to be the first on the dance floor, and you don't want to be it.

Whatever the social media ability to "create" your own algorithm is important. One way being a subscription and sticking to it.

Second being keyword filtering. I use Connect for Android which let's me filter out posts and communities containing keywords.

Same thing I do on reddit with reddit enhancement suite.

It's just the nature social media where anone can sign up.

Well Lemmy is a possible replacement for Reddit but, putting aside my strong biais for Lemmy, it doesn't have to be a Reddit replacement for everyone and it is still building itself up. Here is a few tips to improve your time in hope you'll find on the fediverse the space you look for :

• Try write post on dead looking community. Follower counts have a hard time synchronizing btw instances. A lot of people may be waiting for some activity to happened.
• Try opening niche community in their original instance. The posts wrote on a distance community before the first lemming of your instance opens it are invisible and must be added one by one (by entering it URL in your instance search function). You might found interesting content you missed.
• Try reposting content you see on Reddit on Lemmy. Copy-Paste it and add something like "R*eddit content - OP : @XXX@reddit.com" somewhere in the post. You might not have as much response as OP but it can stir up interesting conversation.
• Try to make an account on the twittoverse (Mastodon, *key...). The community on the microblogging side of the fediverse is much bigger and diverse. You will be able to boost your lemmy content and link it to hashtag so more people may see it. Answer to the original post will even show up on Lemmy. But second level comments will not fediverse well.
• Try to post articles, general question or to do anything to bring some animation to your niche community. Regularity in low engagement content will still bring people that will sooner or later start to engage.
• Don't hesitate to crosspost any related post to your favorite community. Community are silos, instances are silos and the lemming populating is very fragmented. By linking communities together, you'll bring people with the same hobbies than you to the community they did not find out yet. -Don't hesitate to answer at old post. Us lemmings don't have enough activity to complain about people writing back months later, especially in niche community.

Cheers!

Reading the comments here made me realize something.

It’s nice to have good content for niche communities that you enjoy but that’s always been a tall order. As in, a lot of things have to go right to get that organic community feeling and I’ve honestly always thought of it as a privilege and not a right.

I’ve seen plenty of communities die for various reasons or just been in a position where I didn’t have passion to go and talk about my niche interests.

So what’s my point? Niche communities are the icing on the cake of a good platform. When we mostly have for profit platforms and little main stream interest in standardized alternatives, you got to be more realistic.

I really love community-driven social media like Reddit. Lemmy feels… too small. I really loved that Reddit let me jump into any niche hobby, and instantly I had a community.

Please note: you only ever had something like that with Reddit when it had already several years of operation. Even today, you can't jump instantly and find there a community for any niche hobby.

As with all these things: be the change you want to see. Add content, or else it won't be there when you or someone else comes in.

(There's also a feel that Lemmy is "small" becaue it's not only one place and all that)

Lemmy is amazing. I am so glad I found my way here. I was doom scrolling as well. I had to unsubscribe from all my political communities I had joined and just keep one of my news committees. I then expanded the groups for my other interests. This really helped. You are in control of your time line here.

It may not be for everyone. Lemmys growth has stalled out and barring musk buying reddit and turning it to shit i don't see another influx coming. So we're kinda stuck with the community that exists now. Its a pretty good and sustainable community which can provide a lot of general interest posts like news, memes and cats lately. But for other more specific topics if if it's not already a large community here it probably won't be. It's not even just niche interests, professional sports for example has very little presence on here as a whole much less individual sports or teams, and I don't see, for example, a baseball community taking off here no matter how much effort you put in since the current lemmy community isn't much interested in it and your average baseball fan probably won't be coming to lemmy to discuss things.

My recommendation would be to use lemmy for some of those general interest topics, and maybe some of the more popular niche communities if your into them, And go to other places, preferably independent forums or rss feeds, for other things. We don't need one unified scrolling app, it may be a bit more convenient, but the internet is better off if you spread your traffic around.