update: we have a pretty good idea of what we’ll add to start, probably tomorrow. i’m unpinning this post and beginning to reply to posts in here with specifics. thank you for your suggestions to this point

no promises on any specific additions from me or the other mods, but now is a good time to gauge this.[1] for reference, our current 18 non-support communities are:[2]

  • Chat
  • Creative
  • Do It Yourself
  • Entertainment
  • Environment
  • Feminism
  • Finance
  • Free and Open Source Software
  • Gaming
  • Humanities
  • LGBTQ+
  • Music
  • News
  • Politics
  • Science
  • Space
  • Sports
  • Technology

try to be a little broad in your suggestions–this is still a site of just 1,000 people, so it simply can’t be as granular as reddit–but it’s fine if your suggestion is a specific subset of an already existing community or overlaps with one. Space and FOSS are some obvious examples of already existing overlap, and those communities work fine.


  1. and even if we don’t add a suggestion in the immediate term, knowing that there’s interest makes it easier to do so later ↩︎

  2. these communities can always be found at this link (or under the “communities” button), if you weren’t aware ↩︎

  • @salarua@sopuli.xyz
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    3310 months ago

    memes. they’re a huge part of any social network. a dedicated place for memes would boost activity, promote community togetherness, and provide more content for other communities via cross-posting

    • @bonn2@beehaw.org
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      810 months ago

      Yeah and having a dedicated place for them will definitely help keep everywhere else more tidy

    • @salarua@sopuli.xyz
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      810 months ago

      not to mention it would attract more people - like a “come for the memes, stay for the interesting conversations” kind of thing

    • @JackFromWisconsin@midwest.social
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      410 months ago

      Agree. In a similar vein, a humor or jokes community would be nice. Places where you go to get a laugh or have fun and not see anything serious.

    • alyaza [they/she]OPM
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      10 months ago

      a general humor/jokes/memes subreddit is one of the communities we’re going to add, probably tomorrow. it’ll be broader than just memes (and won’t be named memes) for a few reasons, but the big one is just capacity considerations at this point: hosting images here adds up fast and it’s been a problem for us before. we can mitigate some of that by asking people to host offsite, and hopefully orienting it toward humor will also encourage people to make posts that aren’t just images and cut down on some of this

    • @strudel6242@beehaw.org
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      710 months ago

      Yeah, we could post to tech, but it’s not really relevant to people who are, say, PC gamers. Would be a welcome community for sure.

    • alyaza [they/she]OPM
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      310 months ago

      this is one we’ll be adding straightforwardly tomorrow. thank you for the suggestion folks

    • vxnxntA
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      510 months ago

      I agree! A community for sharing pictures (and similar) would be cool to see. Such a community would likely also encourage more OC.

      • Leigh
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        510 months ago

        Yeah, I’m really going to miss /r/earthporn and /r/itookapicture :(

        • vxnxntA
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          510 months ago

          Almost a year ago I created my own community for nature photos at !natur@feddit.de. But since it’s on a german instance with german headlines, it’s probably not that appealing for most users here.

    • alyaza [they/she]OPM
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      110 months ago

      for now, photography and general art stuff is basically covered by /c/creative, and i’ve edited the description to make that more apparent. if it becomes an overwhelming part of the community, that’s when we’ll break it out as its own community. (also see the memes consideration above; image hosting is expensive so ideally people would host their photograph offsite and link it here)

  • Butterbee (She/Her)
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    2010 months ago

    Urbanism if there’s enough interest please! Somewhere to talk about urbanist issues like cycling, transit, housing, and close to home stuff. There’s politics, but but discussing what you saw on the bike path might not fit. There’s technology which fits for things like ebikes and using speed cameras to keep stoplights red unless a car is doing the speed limit or less, but that may not fit into other spaces. Humanities would work for things like transit programs, housing programs, etc…

    So an urbanist community could encompass all of those things that would be split among different forums in one place. And hopefully be a little less abrasive than fuckcars :P

    • petrescatraian
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      1110 months ago

      @Butterbee @alyaza Urbanism would be a great addition, indeed. And fuckcars seems more like a place of venting frustration indeed. On Reddit, I subscribed to r/fuckcarsromania, where the mods actually try to create a movement and stir civic action, from reporting cars parked on the sidewalks (a rampant problem, in Bucharest, but not only) to asking authorities for more pedestrian spaces, better public transit etc.

      I imagine !urbanism@beehaw.org would be a great community to discuss different ideas and stories about better urban planning and how one can make better cities overall, as well as preserving great cities.

    • DJDarren
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      1010 months ago

      I swear half of my Reddit usage in the past few months has been NotJustBikes and FuckCars. So yeah, something like that might be nice.

    • alyaza [they/she]OPM
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      510 months ago

      this is one we’ll be adding tomorrow as long as people are fine with the community being named “citylife”. we debated other names; in the end we think that one will cover the most topics of an urbanist nature while also still being clear in what it’s about (particularly to people who might not know what urbanism is)

  • @leetnewb@beehaw.org
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    10 months ago

    Gardening

    Edit: Just adding a little context. Reddit has ~5.5M subscribers to the gardening sub and there are many active forum communities. It is growing season in much of the U.S. today, but gardening is a pretty universal hobby / skill.

    • alyaza [they/she]OPM
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      510 months ago

      this one will get added tomorrow under the name Nature & Gardening, combining a few of the ideas people have in this thread. thanks!

  • @octobob@lemmy.ml
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    1710 months ago

    Home improvement

    I’m an industrial electrician and mostly used reddit to discuss the trade with folks on r/electricians. I realize that’s probably a bit too niche, but anything related to working on your house, general handiness, renovations, etc are all topics I enjoy discussing and others might as well.

    • alyaza [they/she]OPM
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      510 months ago

      for now i think most? or all of that can be covered by /c/DIY, which is frankly in need of some love and a userbase that kind of content would provide. failing that, Humanities or Chat are always good fallbacks for “I don’t know where this would go, immediately”

    • vxnxntA
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      410 months ago

      Focussing on books and literature? Or what do you have in mind?

      • @JaymesRS@midwest.social
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        410 months ago

        Something similar to the current function of places like r/books. A place discuss books you’re reading or want to read, run reading challenges like r/fantasy’s Book BINGO, get/give recommendations, authors can post about new releases, etc

      • @JaymesRS@midwest.social
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        310 months ago

        Something to replace r/books (or where I’m more commonly r/fantasy). A place for people to discuss the what they’re reading or offer critiques, authors can come in and promote new releases (eventually, potentially), people can get recommendations, etc…

    • alyaza [they/she]OPM
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      310 months ago

      this will be added tomorrow pretty straightforwardly, like with the programming suggestion above. thanks folks

  • PenguinCoderM
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    1510 months ago

    A big aspect of what helped Reddit gain notice and popularity was ‘Ask me Anything’ subreddit (r/IAMA). Described as a new kind of crowdsourced interview, you would have an OP/Participant that has some claim to fame/following come in and answer questions from regular users about ‘whatever’.

    • Gaywallet (they/it)M
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      710 months ago

      I love this idea, but it requires quite a bit of overhead and recruiting to gain popularity. I’m not sure we’re large enough to acquire anyone particularly notable but I’m intrigued by the idea. Are you or anyone else willing to volunteer to help make a place like this work? I’m more than happy to chip in where I can, but this seems like quite the potential undertaking.

      • PenguinCoderM
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        410 months ago

        It is definitely a huge undertaking and need someone with some connections and a customer service mindset. I can’t take the reigns on heading up such a community at this time. But I can help out with technical requirements to support it.

    • mtset
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      510 months ago

      I would also love to see an AMA community.

  • @pretzel@beehaw.org
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    1510 months ago

    Reddit is so vast because so many people have so many niche interests, but so many other people share them. I understand Lemmy is just starting out but will really need to let people do their own thing. Also super curated expert subs are some of the best. Ask history/science even eli5 are super great reading. Also random things like hfy are brilliant

    • alyaza [they/she]OPM
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      410 months ago

      I understand Lemmy is just starting out but will really need to let people do their own thing.

      luckily, this is a benefit of federation. while this specific instance doesn’t have this enabled by default, a lot of other instances do–so if you find this a deal breaker, you could register on another instance which has community creation enabled for all users and still interact with posts here as you desire. (this also goes the other way: from here you can interact with basically all of the communities on other lemmy instances, many of which are much more specific than ours)

  • @kessleragain@beehaw.org
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    1310 months ago

    Maybe as the community grows something related to Food? A spot where people can exchange recipes, share knowledge for beginners, favorite restaurants when traveling, or even just share a pic of an awesome sandwich someone made.

    • alyaza [they/she]OPM
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      410 months ago

      Chat or Humanities should cover this type of content for now, but yeah food’s a good one that we’ll probably add in the near future since it’s kind of an unavoidable topic lol

      • @marco@beehaw.org
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        510 months ago

        Was gonna suggest that one too as I’m very much into discussing food online :) A few suggestions:

        • Food
        • FoodPorn
        • Recipes
        • Baking
        • Breadmaking
        • LowCostMeals
    • @pretzel@beehaw.org
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      210 months ago

      Not just animals but nature in general. Been doing a bioblitz in my local area and been loving understanding everything that lives around me is really cool.

      • alyaza [they/she]OPM
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        110 months ago

        like above: we’ll be adding a Nature & Gardening section tomorrow, so you’ll be able to post stuff like this in that section

    • alyaza [they/she]OPM
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      110 months ago

      for posting pets and stuff, i think Chat would work fine. for more outdoors-y stuff though we’ll be adding a Nature & Gardening section tomorrow.

  • @TheTrueLinuxDev@beehaw.org
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    1210 months ago

    Linux community? It’s relatively broad community that it doesn’t strictly deals with Linux itself, but also various open source projects.

    I am a software developer that works on Linux daily both as hobby and professionally.

    • @Barbarian@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      There are some pretty active Linux communities here on lenny.ml, you might wanna check those out

      EDIT: Just checked your comment history, looks like you already found it :P nvm!

  • Tzeentch
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    10 months ago

    Queer communities in general would be good, be they for advice, memes or sharing in general, both broad queer subs and ones specifically for a given group

    As Reddit moves towards becoming public the odds of them purging queer content to become “family friendly” is quite high, so making sure there’s spaces ready here would be good preparation i think

    Outside of that just more hobby communities in general, from sports, to gardening to card games, any hobby that doesn’t fall within the traditional perview of what tech and foss bros like, so theres something worthwhile here for non techy people

    Especially as one of the appeals of reddit is that it’s all too easy to pop into a subreddit for any hobby and get a basic overview of where to start and an easy place to ask for questions you can’t easily find, being able to replicate that to an extent would be welcome

    • wintermute
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      510 months ago

      I’d love to be a part of card game and tabletop discussions :) The sidebar of the gaming community does mention it’s for all forms, video, tabletop etc. In that regard, maybe we just need to be the ones to start those non-video-game conversations.

      • Tzeentch
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        310 months ago

        Start organising games and posting gametales till the gamers get sick enough to tell us to make a tabletop community, sounds like a plan :>

    • alyaza [they/she]OPM
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      510 months ago

      Queer communities in general would be good, be they for advice, memes or sharing in general, both broad queer subs and ones specifically for a given group

      for now i think just the one we have (LGBTQ+) should cover things pretty well–it’s pretty lightly used overall, so there’s not a big risk of everything getting lost yet. but yeah, we’ll definitely break it into more focused communities with time; there’s already a big contingent of queer people on the site so this might come sooner than expected.

      Outside of that just more hobby communities in general, from sports, to gardening to card games, any hobby that doesn’t fall within the traditional perview of what tech and foss bros like, so theres something worthwhile here for non techy people

      generally i try to tailor what i post here to “non-tech” people, since i fall into that category myself and plenty of folks on here already cover the tech stuff better than i do. this might be a problem that’s also solved just by a bigger userbase (and some of our additions tomorrow). the Gaming community for example is really picking up steam when previously there were basically no posters there, lol