For most communities, especially some of the smaller ones, have posts that are only as recent as 2 months ago at best. I noticed that there is frequent activity on The big communities such as “chapotraphouse”, “chat” and “news”… but that same frequency of activity isn’t replicated on most of the other communities.
For communities like “movies and tv shows”, it feels like visiting a ghost town.
Is activity for people here mostly off this site and elsewhere? Did I not get an invitation or something? It feels like, with regards to activities such as playing games or watching a movie, I see no signs of people on this site doing anything.
So why are most communities lacking in activity?
The comms are more of a tagging system than an actual community. I browse all comms so everything comes through my feed. If I post about a movie, I stick it in the movie comm
This also allows people to choose what content they want to see. If you don’t want to see badposting, you can just unsub
We’re a site of barely a thousand users, and I remember it used to be a lot less, more like 500-600 daily, I assume after federation there was some growth. And of course only a small portion of those users post regularly, which is pretty normal for social-media-esque websites.
So there’s just too many over-specialized comms, that the userbase isn’t really large enough to support. Like, we probably don’t need to have /c/games, /c/ttrpg, /c/tabletop & /c/gamedev as all separate things.
Hexbear is like an old multiplayer game that retains a small but dedicated playerbase that isn’t enough to populate the less popular game modes
In this analogy, comms such as chapotraphouse and games are like team deathmatch and capture the flag
I remember in the initial excitement of setting up the website, a large number of communities were set up that had widely intersecting audiences. If people are going to post something, they’re going to post it once (generally), and if they’re going to post it once, they’re going to post it to the more popular relevant community. Communities rarely get deleted, so now we have a lot of dead ones.
(this reminds me of a very old reddit post where someone complains about the introduction of communities and said that reddit should have gone with a post tagging system instead so that one post could be followed by multiple “comms”)
