I’ll go first. I wish Lemmy communities existed for: destroyed tanks. Ukraine War video report. sopranos duckposting. benzodiazepines.
I will comment more as I think of them.
Lemmy is generally too small for it, but I liked the small regional subreddits like states, counties, and cities.
I know there is a Lemmy instance focused on Atlanta and Atlanta news but that’s about it.
I run a regional instance (lemmy.pt, for Portugal and the Portuguese language) and I definitely feel the hardships of Lemmy being so small. It’s very hard to grow more specialized communities when the overall pull of the platform is so small, since most people looking for ““niche”” topics would rather stick to the bigger communities on Reddit and whatnot instead of opting for the tiny thing going on the Fediverse.
Even on reddit, PT subs are hard to get active. There is /r/Portugal, literaciafinanceira and maybe devpt. I think you are stretching too thin.
Have you thought of just doing 1 sub on Lemmy.pt, and just add [tags] in the title or something? Once Lemmy.pt has enough users, you could slowly open more.
Yeah, sure. That’s because we’re also fairly small and Reddit isn’t really that popular, especially among older folks.
Regarding the 1 sub, I don’t think the issue is having too many communities, seeing as !portugal@lemmy.pt serves as a main hub and has pretty loose restrictions already. The issue is more of the overall visibility of Lemmy paired with the low usage of Reddit-like mediums in Portugal.
I used to miss my local city sub more, but the current mods have basically turned it into a reddit version of Nextdoor.
10 years ago it was mostly punks and weirdos on the sub, then all the normies came and even the fucking local sheriff.
The local sheriff finally fucked off after he got called out for trying to hire a murderer from a neighboring jurisdiction.
I feel like if Lemmy could get big enough, we could get back to where the interesting people are all in one place again.
Our city sub never really had those kinds of issues, drama to be sure from time to time, but for the most part it was just a great place to learn what events were happening that weekend. Or get inside info on something that happened in the news, etc. I have checked in on it a couple times since deleting my Reddit accounts, but it’s not the same and feels off since joining lemmy.