Asking this to the general audience because that’s a comment I’ve seen quite a lot recently.
So, let’s start with a list of communities that could be interesting to a wide audience, sorted by monthly active users (MAU), the most active being on top.
- !moviesandtv@lemmy.film (1.6k MAU)
- !casualconversation@lemmy.world (521 MAU)
- !personalfinance@lemmy.ml (453 MAU)
- !fiction@literature.cafe (140 MAU)
- !gardening@thegarden.land (133 MAU)
- !relationship_advice@lemmy.world (130 MAU)
- !recipes@lemmy.world (69 MAU)
- !parenting@lemmy.world (56 MAU)
- !skincareaddiction@sh.itjust.works (31 MAU)
- !longreads@sh.itjust.works (24 MAU)
- !malefashionadvice@lemmy.world (12 MAU)
- !femalefashionadvice@lemmy.world (9 MAU)
Those numbers may seem low, but remember that those are active users, who at least commented or posted in the last month. So even if you are afraid to be shouting to the abyss, there will be other people next to you to keep the ball rolling.
Also, please note that those communities are suffering from the current tedious discoverability of new content on Lemmy. I’m hoping to make them more popular with this post, as I’m sure those are topics that can interest a lot of people.
Another thing to keep in mind is that Lemmy cannot replace 18 years of content creation overnight. It will take time for those communities to grow to the same level of content and activity than there counterpart, but with a bit of time, we’ll get there.
In addition, there are a few places to look out for new communities.
The first place to look for is https://lemmyverse.net, but Lemmy.world communities are currently excluded for some reason (https://github.com/tgxn/lemmy-explorer/issues/139).
A second place is this community: !newcommunities@lemmy.world. People tend to promote their communities there, you can also ask for a community you are looking for.
Finally, !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl provides a daily report of communities becoming popular.
I started using Sync, despite disagreeing with their privacy policy, just so I can block entire instances, and use filter words. I’ve added Musk, Trump, Politics, Twitter, and a bunch of other filter words to my block list, then filtered hexbear completely, and a couple of other problematic, one-dimensional instances, and Lemmy is a lot more enjoyable now. It’s okay reading about those subjects occasionally, but my feed was like 95% filled with those topics. Some of them aren’t even topics that would normally bother me, but it was like every single post.