I think while the general communities have made it, a lot of niche communities failed to attract enough population to keep on generating more content. As an example, just search for the "Imaginary" series of landscape art communities on the Fediverse (eg. ImaginaryVistas). Many of them don't have any recent posts or 1 post per days or weeks. That's not enough to keep people invested. Even the largest digital art community is still mostly carried by 1 person.

[–] Nighed@sffa.community 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I think a lot of the imaginary communities were on one of the .ml instances so are currently in suspended animation. That domain shutdown was really badly timed...

Otherwise, it's the standard problem that only a small % actually post and Lemmy is much smaller. I do think that a better/fixed hot algorithm would help with post discoverability for smaller communities though.

( I mod a niche imaginary community for the Cosmere book series(es))

[–] amju_wolf@pawb.social 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yeah, I don't think asking communities that are already fairly small on Reddit to create the same community on Lemmy was a good idea.

For something like this it'd be best to start with a single community for the whole broad topic (like, ImaginaryStuff). Hell, Reddit used to be a "single subreddit" originally. And the niche subreddits didn't pop up until fairly recently where they were actually able to entice enough people to use them.

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