Just a little rant. When I first visited Lemmy Sites a couple of months ago it felt empty. Besides the really mainstream community pretty much everything else just felt empty.
Meanwhile though traffic has increased a lot and I feel well entertained by the traffic in c/hfy c/noncredibledefence c/keepwriting c/worldbuilding and so on. It is certainly less than Reddit but often quality is substancially higher and is "enough" to keep me entertained.
Also I like that you can actually post something without running into a bazillion deletes, bans and moderator shitshat because your post was two words to short, not NCD enough and so on.
Sure, the C64 community on Lemmy is laughable. So is the ARMA community. I still use REddit for that. Also I often check up stuff on r/hfy and r/NCD but since one week I have been prefering Lemmy for that.
Also my longer posts don't get eaten up any more. God, three weeks ago most posts with 3k an more just got lost without feed back. Nowadays I have even manges posts around 20k without breaking them up. Though the editor is still lacking for longer posts. On Reddit I can copy-paste pretty much anything from Libreoffice into Reddits Editor (which is also pretty lacking but differently lacking). On Lemmy I have to run most text through a little perl script to get them even using correct line breaks perl -pe 's/\n/\n\n/' and different sizes for Headlines are much to few to select from.
Not perfect, not even very good but definitely promising.
Maybe someone here already said this but if you find a community with not a lot of traffic here, make sure to post in it. Others might go looking for it and find nothing, just like you did. Perpetual cycle of I see nothing, I leave. If someone's active, maybe someone else will be active with you. And then two turns to four to 8 and so on. Even if it feels like you're screaming into the void, keep screaming. The void is infinite and someone's bound to hear you eventually.
To add on that, I'm trying to figure out how people can easily find those small volume niche communities, and it seems like it's a hassle.
So I set up a community on my server : https://lemmy.mindoki.com/c/sharingiscaring@lemmy.mindoki.com
Post your small community there, and I'll have a user sub to it.
Why?
Because if at least 1 user on a server subs to a community (on another server) then that community will show up when filtering with All (All + new should show even small posts, at least sometimes).
If this is a good idea, maybe everyone running a small (read: low volume) server could do this to really get Federation going!
Cheers
Loulou / Valmond @ lemmy.mindoki.com
My new shiny missis sharer has been created, it's me!
Give me your smallest subs and I'll federate them!