Yes Lemmy is smaller and doesn't have instantly fully formed communities. Reddit has been around for almost 2 decades. Lemmy is newer, smaller, and actively fights the sorts of shenanigans that Reddit initially used to get big.

If you want more niche activity, make posts and interact with posts. Lemmy is user driven- that means you. It isn't a giant megasite where you can just expect to be a passive receiver of endless content.

you gotta realize reddit didn't just "appear" one day with those obscure niche topics built out. There is a network effect large communities have. We need hundreds of thousands more members before that is possible.

I think you probably weren't there for early reddit, but most of the active posters here on Lemmy were. It was tiny. Like Lemmy.

You can't force those niche communities to exist here. It doesn't work. But what you can do is post and create valuable content. and eventually we may get there.

Here's something I learned, don't be afraid to block. Political sub you don't want? blocked. Person shouting about China in a cat sub? blocked.

Also add blacklisted keywords, it cuts down on politics a ton

We have to be the thing we want to see out in the world. If we want open source communities and an internet free of corporate influence then we have to do the work required to build them. It's not going to happen by magic.

Feel free to block communities with political content.

You can also use an app or alternative frontend to filter keywords. !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca has a post about that.

For communities, !newcommunities@lemmy.world can help

For home kit, the Apple communities are probably more active, and you should be able to post about it there too

The Fediverse is virgin territory. The trails aren't blazed for you here; it's your job as an early adopter to make it the way you want it to be. You want a community? Start it and participate in it.

On the other hand, Lemmy is full of political content lately.

Unfollow communities with political content, and all that goes away.

i think that your experience is the most common experience that moonlighting & ex-redditors have with lemmy and is the biggest "sore spot" that most lemmings have.

like you, i hate how big tech enshitifies social media and that's been making me move from one social media platform to the next since the 1990's (since before it was called social media). i'm convinced that the enshitification is pushed by big tech's investors in an effort to squeeze out as much profits from the platform as possible; resulting in the types of enshitification that you see on reddit, or facebook, or bluesky or etc. i think that this fact gives lemmy the best chance out of NOT enshitifying, or at least not as fast as reddit or bluesky did.

i used to be on reddit too, but lemmy works better for me and i think it's because of what it was designed to do; it's as if all the left leaning political subreddits (eg r/communism, r/socialism, r/anarchy, r/politics, etc.) got together to create their own social media safe space on the fediverse away from reddit's toxicity. so they did in lemmy and; when the investors pushed u/spez to enshitify reddit; a whole bunch of people left reddit and filled the ranks of lemmy.

when that happened this tankie safe space did the same thing that its real-world counterpart safe-spaces-for-the-ostracized spaces do. like gay neighborhoods, they got gentrified by a MUCH LARGER group of people with better finances and social connections and, during the transition, there's lots of things that the gentrifiers don't like, like late night loud music; or lack of schools; or the "politics" (in this specific situation).

the gentrifiers usually succeed eventually and those pesky life-altering politics will be pushed aside like the high rents & $10 coffee shops push away the artists and agitators that originally made the neighborhood an attractive place to inhabit and they'll go do it all over again in some other neighborhood somewhere else once they're successfully pushed out where the cycle of humanity repeats itself all over again.

I like to cook vegan food and post about it 😊

A lot of focus is put onto posting, but I like to encourage commenters. I'll post and respond all day, but if nobody is interacting, it's going to stay quiet. Put the quiet to your advantage by doing things like:

If you like an image, say what you like about it. Lately, I've been having people talk about how they really have been enjoying dawn/dusk pictures, so I've been collecting more of that so I can post what people are in the mood for. It gives me good feedback, it gives people a chance to agree or disagree with you, and you got to participate.

Do you ask anyone any question? Take advantage of the relative quiet. With not having a million comments on every post, I have plenty of time to give you really detailed answers. I got asked how to differentiate between 2 animals yesterday, and I had time to make a nice visual guide, highlighting key differences and giving multiple visual examples of potential variations while still simplifying the process of identification. If there's a million people talking like on Reddit, it's hard to give people that much attention, but here it's easy. I pretty much take time to respond to every comment.

Don't be afraid to go off topic. Rules seem to be looser in many communities because of the low post count. This week, I posted something from a country with a different language, and I ended up having 3 days of conversation with a native speaker who filled me in on tons of subtleties of the language pertaining to our niche topic. I got to learn so much, and they got to learn a few things about English.

I feel you have to do something to have a good time here, but it needn't be to post multiple things every day, but it's more than just up or downvoting something like you can get away with on Reddit. We're too small for you to have a free ride. But make someone laugh. Let them know that you liked their post with a short comment. If you don't like it, say hey, do you have any content on such and such instead. Make a post saying, hey, what's your thoughts on this? It doesn't need to be something groundbreaking or insightful, you just need to give a sign of life so we know you're here, and one of us will probably talk back to you.

Interact enough like that, and you may find what you enjoy doing, if that turns out to be posting, or you become the resident expert on a topic even if you're not an expert, being a serial commenter, or whatever it may be. It's a great opportunity if you make it one because it is so easy to get attention here if you try.

I'm not typically a social person, but being here has let me talk about what I want, when I want, and somebody will listen to it, and I can ask about things I want to know and get answers. There's much less shouting into the void like at Reddit. Play Lemmy to its strengths and you will find enjoyment. And if you don't like it, go to where you're happy. Nobody's going to hate you if you split time between here and Reddit.

Lurk on Reddit. Post on Lemmy.

I like it as a platform but the userbase just isn't there.

Seeing all the cats made me realize that we need to all participate to make the community what we want it to be. It’s clear to me there are a lot of lurkers based on the influx of cat pictures. The more we start posting in ANY instance the more visibility there will be for active users.

Niches really need a way to advertise themselves and then congregate in one place. It's a bit sad to see two communities for the same thing in different instances and neither get the critical mass of posters needed to survive.

I hate reddit as a platform but I still have to use it every once in a while because people won't move to Lemmy/mbin/piefed.

I honestly don't understand it. People complain that they don't use the fediverse because it's small but somehow they don't realize if they just migrate over then it won't be.

It's aggravating how dumb people can be but hey, that's the world we're living in. I'll continue to use Lemmy and visit reddit if I have to.

Well Lemmy is a possible replacement for Reddit but, putting aside my strong biais for Lemmy, it doesn't have to be a Reddit replacement for everyone and it is still building itself up. Here is a few tips to improve your time in hope you'll find on the fediverse the space you look for :

• Try write post on dead looking community. Follower counts have a hard time synchronizing btw instances. A lot of people may be waiting for some activity to happened.
• Try opening niche community in their original instance. The posts wrote on a distance community before the first lemming of your instance opens it are invisible and must be added one by one (by entering it URL in your instance search function). You might found interesting content you missed.
• Try reposting content you see on Reddit on Lemmy. Copy-Paste it and add something like "R*eddit content - OP : @XXX@reddit.com" somewhere in the post. You might not have as much response as OP but it can stir up interesting conversation.
• Try to make an account on the twittoverse (Mastodon, *key...). The community on the microblogging side of the fediverse is much bigger and diverse. You will be able to boost your lemmy content and link it to hashtag so more people may see it. Answer to the original post will even show up on Lemmy. But second level comments will not fediverse well.
• Try to post articles, general question or to do anything to bring some animation to your niche community. Regularity in low engagement content will still bring people that will sooner or later start to engage.
• Don't hesitate to crosspost any related post to your favorite community. Community are silos, instances are silos and the lemming populating is very fragmented. By linking communities together, you'll bring people with the same hobbies than you to the community they did not find out yet. -Don't hesitate to answer at old post. Us lemmings don't have enough activity to complain about people writing back months later, especially in niche community.

Cheers!

If the BlueSky migration keeps up the pace, I think it will be a good bet that Reddit to Lemmy will be the next big user migration. There's signs it's already started, within the last year I've been here I've seen the community and sub-communities grow significantly and there's been an increase of self-proclaimed converts over the last several months.

I get it. I basically have to browse on the everything tab to get enough content, and just block the politics communities because I get enough of that from everywhere else in life. I've been using the lack of content to just ween myself off social media though, rather than go back to Reddit. This is the only "social media app" I have installed on my phone unless you count Discord and YouTube

I really love community-driven social media like Reddit. Lemmy feels… too small. I really loved that Reddit let me jump into any niche hobby, and instantly I had a community.

Please note: you only ever had something like that with Reddit when it had already several years of operation. Even today, you can't jump instantly and find there a community for any niche hobby.

As with all these things: be the change you want to see. Add content, or else it won't be there when you or someone else comes in.

(There's also a feel that Lemmy is "small" becaue it's not only one place and all that)

All I’m getting lately in my feed are cats!

Here is a list of keywords that I filter out. I also block all political content communities.