Yeah so I’ve also seen a lot of people talk about this.

Many of us miss our niche communities. Most of the subs I subscribed to were niche or medium level.

there just aren’t enough people on Lemmy for a ton of niche communities to stay active.

But I’m also okay with rarely-active niche communities.

One of my favorite reddit subs was “I’ll be your guide”. Only a handful of posts a year but good stuff. Basically videos or guides that were funny or absurd. I recall posting a video that was a legitimate guide on how to poop in the woods.

Yeah advice and help hobby/general communities are incredibly useful and so I have some thoughts about those.

When I first started using reddit I went to r/photography and asked some questions about an old film camera I had just got and was told I couldn’t ask thoe questions there and had to go to the film camera sub. Which I found a little annoying. R/photography (over the 13 years I subscribed to it) mostly became places for only fans photographers to post naked women. Call it art. To the point that was a large portion of photographs posted.

But I couldn’t ask about film. And novice and amateur photographs would just get downvoted with little to no comments.

I recall when I posted on r/sewing about a problem I was having with sewing vinyl, I Was told I needed to use the fabric/textiles sub. (Or something like that). You could only share things you made. Not ask for help. I thought that was so weird. (Also the textile sub was basically inactive so I got no help)

I think it’s a situation that further division of communities into designated “advice/help” oriented subs/communities is only needed when there are a lot of people asking questions all the time and other content isn’t getting seen. If that isn’t happening, we don’t need to separate people posting their projects and people asking for help.

I recently posted on a PC community here about needing some help with using streaming software but wasn’t sure where to ask. People on that community helped me. I didn’t need a dedicated community for that question. There is no such community on Lemmy. Probably because it’s not needed.

That wouldn’t have been acceptable on reddit and I certainly would have gotten told “don’t post questions here, you need to use the sub for specific streaming services”.

There is an Enshitification that happens when platforms become too big. Too popular. They will always then be used to market and manipulate . And it just spirals down. No solution.

There are tradeoffs with using smaller platforms. We get less spam here. Less bots. Less sock puppets (but these do exist here too). When you comment and get replies it’s much more likely it’s a real person and not a bot like reddit.

The conversations go slower. By that I mean if I see a post that’s a day old and make a comment. Other people see it. I get replies. Unlike reddit. 1 day is old news. No one is looking at 1 day old posts on reddit.

I quite like this slower pace and feel like I’m having more genuine interactions instead of just lurking or making a comment no one is ever going to read. Which encourages me to be more active. And I’m sure other people feel similar.

This is getting long so I’ll let you reply before I keep rambling forever.