Back with newsgroups the general rule was to go from general to specific. You start with a general discussion group and when discussions about video games get annoying you create a games group. If then there are too many Baldur’s Gate discussions you create BG. If they are dominated by Baldur’s Gate 3 you create a Baldur’s Gate 3 group. If everyone is fawning over Withers you create a Withers group which of course will be flooded with discussion about the Withers’ tits mod, which shall get its own group.
Meaning you should create a group when demand is there and not the other way around.
Do you have any examples in mind?
A good example would be !formula1@lemmy.world. I don’t remember seeing anything about Formula 1 outside of this community, yet it exists, and people have some discussions.
I was also thinking about !flightsim@lemmyfly.org and !xplane@lemmy.world. Theoretically, the chain should look like this: general discussion -> gaming -> flightsim -> xplane. In practice, the last two are so small that it’s hard to imagine them manifesting in a general discussion about games. The example of Baldur’s Gate 3 is way too simplistic given how enormously popular that game is.
Both flightsim communities are practically dead. Does that mean they shouldn’t exist and that they can’t grow without notable demand elsewhere? I don’t know. I want to try and test that hypothesis by adding content. I just know from my experience that when I’m searching for a niche community and see it’s dead, I drop it. But if there’s even minimal activity, I might subscribe and participate.
I think what needs to be tacked on is you need the generalized communities to point to the niches. Sure, you can start the formula1 or flightsim community immediately - that group already exists outside the fediverse and you just need to give them a new location. Sure.
But for your niche communities, you need the general community to be a launching off point for the others. You need the gamer who’s interested in different controllers to see the other flightsim community exists and decide to follow it too. You need to give the average person a way to discover the community without already knowing explicitly that it exists.
Otherwise, you’ll only attract people who are migrating from one service to another(and doing a 1:1 swap of their communities) and not reach the general audience. A lot of hobbies or communities I’ve joined were because of someone else mentioning it in a different but related community.
Think about people in general: no one starts by saying they want to program data tables in Python. They start with a general interest in computers and move on from there.
I don’t see how we contradict each other. I didn’t say we shouldn’t create general communities. My point was that we don’t necessarily need to wait for a visible demand in a general community because it might never manifest itself for smaller things, although people might be silently looking for them.
We don’t really disagree. I think you should make the communities. But I also think they won’t grow until they’re being mentioned on the general community.
FYI, lemmyfly.org is on sale, the instance doesn’t exist anymore
If you want to keep !xplane@lemmy.world active, you can promote it on !communitypromo@lemmy.ca, and probably other flight communities like !aviation@lemmy.zip
I’d probably use “for sale” in this context. “On sale” colloquially means “available at reduced price”, and GoDaddy’s price for lemmyfly (4.9k$) seems pretty high for a .org.
On Reddit there’s a couple (animal) trapping subreddits, one of which I run. While very active they typically have less than 100 people in them.
I could see a something like a generalist Hobbies communities leading to the creating of a more niche Trapping one
I don’t think “hobbies” makes sense as a generalist community. No one is interested in “hobbies” as a general concept, they’re interested in their own specific hobby. Trying to consolidate completely unrelated hobbies into one space in the hopes that more people will subscribe won’t work if those people have no common ground to discuss together in that space.
I think something you’re missing is that “we create communities as needed” has an inverse as well. “We delete communities as needed”. Sometimes you create the general topic and it’s so general that all of the niches overtake it. When that happens and the general just isn’t needed, you prune it. No community has to exist forever and sometimes it’s only purpose will be as a reference point to others. And sometimes even that isn’t needed anymore and it vanishes too.
It’s a constantly changing, dynamic system. The point is that it should cater to what’s needed/being used at the moment.
At this moment, there are at least a few manual hobbies that could coexist on the same community
They don’t have to be as interested in the other ones as their own niche, but at least they can share space and activity.
You could potentially have an “outdoor hobbies” with fishing, camping, animal trapping etc.
You kind of already see this when all of those hobbies can post to !imadethis@lemm.ee