Ask Lemmy

You can search instances and communities with https://lemmyverse.net/communities

These are some communities to find new and active communities:

• !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
• !fedigrow@lemm.ee
• !newcommunities@lemmy.world
• !findacommunity@lemmy.ml
• !communities@ponder.cat
• !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl
• !lemmydirectory@lemmy.dbzer0.com
• !communitypromo@feddit.org (german communities)

Well, some of them just don't have enough population to get much activity. In some cases, it might be that nobody has made a community, or that people who are interested haven't found the community.

If you aren't already doing it, I'd use lemmyverse.net. When you search on a lemmy instance for a community, it only searches through the communities that that lemmy instance knows about. Instances without a large user population tend to have a limited view of the Threadiverse. The lemmyverse.net guys have a bot that keeps re-indexing the whole Threadiverse.

Your home instance is...hey, another lemmy.today user! So, lemmy.today is a small instance, and it could easily not know about other communities out there.

If you're not already, hit:

https://lemmyverse.net/communities

Can click to copy the community name (e.g. !fishing@lemmy.ca). Then search for that in the Lemmy Web UI. It may tell you that your instance doesn't know about it, and ask if you want to trigger a search. Click "yes" and your home instance (in this case, lemmy.today) will go to talk to the remote one (in this case, lemmy.ca), and pick up information about the community.

Once

if

you subscribe to a remote community, your home instance will start to get posts from it. Have to have at least one user on your home instance subscribed for that to happen.

EDIT: If you are subscribed to a community that doesn't have activity, posting helps -- a lot of people are willing to comment, but won't go out and submit posts. And there's a community used to help promote communities, !communitypromo@lemmy.ca, which is aimed at helping encourage people to find communities, if you think that you've got a good one and want to encourage other people to head over there.

Is the instance really that significant? I'm aware mod policies and defederation has an effect, but the good stuff tends to correlate with individual communities. At least from what I've seen.

And communities seem to be best found by reading /all.

For voyager app: search > explore > sort by scaled (or any of the other sort options). Or just hit search and start typing

The local aspect isn't there for most of us.

As a somewhat regular user of the Colorado outdoors, I hope we get a Colorado Hike & Bike community. I know there's at least a few of us because we've discussed Denver biking in the fuckcars community before.

As far as finding replacements, my advice is don't limit yourself by platform when finding equivalents, but focus on the quality and type of the community.

To clarify,

Early on I kind of mapped centralized and federated social media pairs, Reddit-Lemmy, Facebook-Diaspora, Twitter-Mastadon, etc.

Turns out, that was a limiting mindset.

The best basket-weaving group might be a Mastadon hashtag. The best Lego minifigure painting content might be on Pixtagram, and we all know he best place to ask a question is not askreddit, but asklemmy!

I think ..... I .... well

doesn't the LSD help?

I was going to leave a snarky reply saying "By going to reddit", but you said you mentioned reddit in your post already. Unfortunately, Lemmy just doesn't have the population to sustain niche communities. You might find them but then realize there are a only few old posts and no real activity.

Just post in asklemmy until someone tells me to go away.

Wait until the first attempt implodes and it makes the rounds in the drama communities with a link to the mk2.

I did not claim it is a good system, but it is very successful.