I think a lot of these are going to be placeholder for a while until more generalized communities like this one see more growth. It’ll be a while before we even hit 100k subscribers here, and you need to have a subset of those people who are looking to talk about an even more specific interest in more depth.
In principle I agree with you, but it’s also a “chicken and egg” type problem. Many people aren’t going to switch to Lemmy if there isn’t a modicum of coverage for more specialized topics.
I think getting to somewhere beyond 100K MAU will have a transformative effective on activity in some more specialized communities.
On one hand I understand this, but on the other hand I’d like to post games I find that fit these subgenres or talk about that subgenre without making myself the biggest spammer in !games, and I think (time will tell!) I do have the stubbornness necessary to scream into the void until people come along. Maybe I should crosspost the ones I think are most likely to have mass appeal…
I feel if I spontaneously quit all my niche gaming communities and posted everything I’d post there on a general community instead, I’d annoy everyone with a bunch of Steam links for games they probably do not care about. People in the niche communities are more likely to care about a link to a game in a genre they already like. Also, for most of the small communities I’ve got at least one other poster sometimes, and that’s better than nobody! Despite all the trouble with incremental.social and federation, when I can get on there we do have a few regulars chatting there and that’s nice.
contains gender politicsThere’s also just fans of a certain genre being used to backlash from the wider gaming community. I did get mostly upvotes when I posted !otomegames, which is mostly romance visual novels for women who like men, to !newcommunities. I appreciate it. But I am not sure how posting these games to !games would go over, especially when I suspect Lemmy to be male-dominated. Visual novels already suffer from the “it’s all just hentai” stereotype. Now add the “media for women, especially romance media, is stupid and vapid and silly” prejudice. And even for those who just live and let live, I suspect most of the general !games community would be disinterested in otome game posts, which is fair because I’m disinterested in romance and/or sex visual novels aimed at men who want to date women (although they should definitely be allowed to exist and people should be allowed to like them in peace). So both to avoid any backlash, and to avoid annoying the wider community, I don’t want to post those games to this general community. I still want a space for it on Lemmy though, so I made that community. I have one other regular poster and sometimes people drop in and comment.
You could make the argument that I’m simply posting low-quality content, and I’d just have to raise the bar for !games to accept my posts, and that I just want my niches back, to which I say: fair. But unfortunately I’m no video game expert or connoisseur. I play and enjoy. The lovely guide and wiki makers usually get there before I can. I’m not too good at coming up with fun discussion questions that are better than what I’d consider low-tier engagement bait back on Reddit like “name one good thing about [noncontroversial character]”. So link posts it is, better some on-topic content than none at all. And even if I did write a wonderful in-depth review or guide, if it’s not for some big mainstream appeal game but something that only genre enthusiasts really like, not sure how well !games would take to it. So that’s my rationale for having these niche communities. You’re still very free to think I’m wrong ;) Thanks for contributing in earnest to !games!
You’re probably right, but most of these do exist already, so I figure not why not continue trying to use them (and to direct attention from this big community there)? Also probably doesn’t help a lot of instances have general games communities. We’re pretty splintered. Now that I think about it I should probably crosspost to some of the bigger ones.
The Cycle: Frontier. It was a pvpve extraction shooter that had such potential. Struggled to keep cheaters at bay, but it felt like they were making progress until one day they announced they were shutting down. Every month or two someone in our group chat brings it up and we’re collectively sad that it’s gone.
“If something wears out after the warranty expires, here’s an independent online store with a full inventory of all replaceable parts, along with the instructions for how to fix them.”
bin.pol.social
Gorące