Kind of a companion thread to the recent one on !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com asking people which community there were missing.
I had a quick look, and most of those seem to be niches that can’t be filled until we reach a higher population.
There is still maybe some potential improvement about some less well-known community that other people are interested in and that could some additional activity.
I try to help to make less known communities known with the regular threads on !newcommunities@lemmy.world (now moving to !communitypromo@lemmy.ca ), but there is probably only a level of detail we have to stop at with 47k monthly active users.
One example is !jrpg@lemmy.zip, it seems reasonable active, and is probably a better compromise than having each game having its own community.
Similar with !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works, or !showsandmovies@lemm.ee. I posted a thread about Ted Lasso a few days ago, it got some nice comments, but probably not enough to have a full fledged dedicated community.
I think part of it is that searching isn’t intuitive. Some of the apps make it easier, but some are bad at it. The web interface for a newcomer isn’t set up where you can just scan the page and see a friendly spot to go at it. You have to look for it. It isn’t hard to find, and anyone familiar with the internet should know where to look, but it is a barrier.
I say that because I’ve had people irl complain about it when trying to use lemmy for the first time.
I just checked, LW still has this on their banner:![](https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/15d36eb8-fad0-426a-b75b-992eed38bd51.webp)
Not ideal, but probably something other instances could maybe emulate
Maybe it would also be helpful to have a “welcome message” that a new user of a lemmy instance receives as a notification after registration. This message could include information about community discovery, information about different instances, frontends, and so on. (Each instance should be able to have their own “welcome message”, of course.)
here’s the Github feature request for this https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1807
Give it a thumbs up reaction so the devs know to prioritize it
I wonder if any 3rd party apps do this?
@otter@lemmy.ca mentioned doing that for lemmy.ca in another comment
That is a great idea! I never use a browser for lemmy after signup so I’ve never seen it bait before