Hard to say exactly, say that an average post has ≥5 total comments from ≥3 unique users? That would be enough to say that posting isn’t shouting into the void

I have to disagree with you here. Nominally, what you’re saying is kinda true, but the old school boards I’m thinking of would have a directory like structure with (usually) clear labels and with little overlap – most of the time having a shared theme for the entire message board. Notably, these boards were not federated with multiple versions of each branch of the structure living side by side. In terms of “what goes where”, even very broad scope traditionalist message boards were/are a lot easier to follow. That doesn’t mean your’re wrong that one has to learn to understand the platform as it is, it’s a fair point.

Thanks for the suggestions, that seems like a strategy with many positives for Lemmy in general and smaller communities in particular.

That way you don’t feel forced to only participate in the popular instances and communities.

I feel very seen by this reply because I think this is at the heart of it for me.

Yeah, fair enough, but in the good old days boards used to have clear structures for topics, off topic sections etc. Lemmy is a bit messy at times…

I have found many communities to subscribe to, but I can’t say I have gotten into visiting them individually a lot. By default, my instance’s stock front-end loads the top posts from all communities on all federated instances, and that’s mainly how I’ve been getting into the action.

Of course, I want to promote growth and activity in smaller communities, but there are also a lot of those minuscule ones that get drowned out on your front page if you don’t make the rounds and visit each.

I added a little context to the main post just to bring a clear example of what inspired this post. But I would also say that I don’t really know of any real catch all community that’s populated, text focused and “catch all”.

I get you. I can never think of anything that would be interesting to post or ask in the more discussion-oriented communities, let alone choose a specific one to post in. I definitely find comments easier, as well as posting to more niche communities. I feel the scope is usually better defined there.

I tend to feel the same way (and by no means am I saying the world is missing out on my would be posts). It’s easier to join a discussion that’s already going or go off a prompt. What really started this train of thought is that I felt that what I wanted to discuss became too off-topic to the thread that prompted it.

Would you say it’s about not knowing if your post would be accepted in the community, or just finding the best place for it? If it’s the latter, AskLemmy could be good for general questions, or failing that, any of the casual chat communities such as !chat@beehaw.org.

Thank you for those tips. I’m sure this problem could be broken down in to many parts, I think the base task of identifying where a post will meet the format requirement would be the first threshold – and I think that’s often hard. Then there’s the whole thing of getting the whole vibe of a community, etc.

As long as your post meets the rules of the community/instance, I feel it’s better to post somewhere than not at all - people can always crosspost it elsewhere if they like.

I support this sentiment, it’s sensible for growing the platform.

I really like that you get to see both downvotes and upvotes, but maybe that reinforces your experience of being downvoted often?

I just wanna see people that are excited about things: photography, 3d printing, weird keyboards, etc. And that exists here, but it’s drowned out by all the doom and gloom.

Yeah this is a general problem, even if you’d just want the ”doom and gloom” – no matter what thing you want to sort out or get more of - you’re left with a ghost town. It’s everything or nothing and the things generating the most discussion are for sure the catastrophic stuff happening.

I run Debian, super happy with it (also have tried Ubuntu and Steam OS/Arch, liking both). As a noob, what would/could I expect gain by distro hopping?

Why would you want a “fun” interface? Both KDE and Gnome are perdy nice, by my noob standards