four new Beehaw communities (and a word on new community creations)

Seconded!

I think the other hand is that beehaw itself is more like a general "home" server. There will be instances with more niche interests that you can subscribe and interact with. And beehaw seems to be more about building a community in the broader sense. But idk, I'm not the big yeehaw of beehaw.

In terms of lemmy as a platform, having small communities that can develop shared norms and knowledge is what will make it worthwhile and avoid the general feeling of being “over run” with low quality content. the big tent groups will always be lowest common denominator. Also the general topics do not want to get full of a specific kind of common but boring post. Like /r/apple (IIRC) didn’t allow tech support type question; there is a separate space for that.

on these points: Lemmy has no shortage of small communities--and those have overwhelmingly gone poorly and/or not really developed in that way (nor have the "big tent" groups, which you must remember are hundreds of orders of magnitude smaller than Reddit's) in the past year and a half on the platform. it's possible the new influx of users will breathe life into some of these, but most of them are completely dead and will always be, and basically just clutter the experience. i'm also not really sure what we can do objectively about the "common but boring" post you describe, since that's going to always be a subjective measure, but we do already prune comments people report as low-quality so it's not ridiculous to me that we'd also try and apply some baseline level of quality to posts.

In your position I would consider making a “new group request” section where people can post their ideas and others can express interest. You could request for people to do a bit of work such as writing up community guidelines to show some effort. When a group is rejected by this instance and they form somewhere else; in most cases you could allow them to link to that (unless it is you know terrible) so it can be found by others in the future. I understand that would entail a whole lot of work and headaches to run and people will be mad about it but over time it could shake out to allow actually communties.

this is not to shut down this idea, but in my honest experience: i don't think most of the people requesting communities will put this much effort in, which would just be a headache for us (because we'd probably just have to ignore it) and for the suggester (because i mean... where else are they asked to justify, on that level, a proposal for an internet community?). the vast majority of suggestions we've gotten to this point have been one-line or very brief suggestions, not a pitch package, and i expect that to not change.

in any case i don't think this will happen in the immediate term if we do it. that would be another space we have to really keep an eye on, and we're already covering a lot with not very many people.

Precisely this. Leaving Reddit I am now seeking a home for discussing specific software libraries, sub-genres of music and cultivating specific types of plants. Am I to understand that Lemmy/Beehaw doesn't offer this easily without setting up your own server? If so I see this as a massive showstopper for ongoing advancement of popularity. There's people passionate about a subject who will give hours and hours of their weeks to investing in a discussion or moderating etc. but who are not technically confident enough to run a server.

I'm not asking this to bitch, what is here right now is amazing and great and highly virtuous choices of new communities but I am questioning if Lemmy is the answer to what are my own current interests from a new community platform.

That's being reserved for a special surprise further down the road.

Sea bees? The ongoing adventures of a crew of bees on a boat?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabee

yeah, we had some difficulty coming up with a good name for that one which encompassed what we and Wigglet meant by it, but i think the current name captures it pretty well and so far all of the posts there have been very much in the spirit of what we want posted there

don't forget to comment there so i can make you a mod!!

Where are the lines for what kinds of hobby spaces have a home on beehaw? i.e. will there be an anime/manga instance at some point?

that's one of the ones which should be on the community survey we send out

Where do you draw the line on specificity as well? There’s a gaming community, but what about ones for specific games? I figure that’s out of scope for beehaw, but I’m just trying to get an idea for what the future of the community is as far as hobbyist spaces are here, given that’s largely what I used reddit for

i don't think we'll ever get to the point on here where we're so granular we make individual game communities (and i think the rest of Lemmy may cover for that anyways), but:

• we'll probably add more granular divisions of gaming over time, so for example splitting tabletop and boardgame discussions off into their own community, or maybe a particularly popular genre of game off into its own community
• i can definitely see the possibility of more physical hobbies like woodworking, knitting, sewing, birdwatching, etc. getting their own communities way down the line. we already have a really active gardening community, which wasn't a community i personally expected to take off.
• we're already relatively granular with technological stuff too due to the demographics of the community so there might be tech hobbyist communities i'm not immediately thinking of which are well suited to being added eventually

/r/LeftWithoutEdge, which took the principled stance about 5 years ago that maybe Reddit left communities didn't need to be all about killing everyone constantly. they're also not particularly large in terms of active users, so they nicely slot into "large enough to build a community on here around, but small enough they won't really influence the trajectory of the overall community"