Seems like it would be a good way to funnel content into more niche communities by tying their posts to whatever is posted on a subreddit until they can take off on their own.

Does such a thing exist? If not, making it shouldn't be too difficult. I could probably whip something up real quick and toss it up on a software sharing platform.

Would anyone be interested in something like this? It could actually work really well with Lemmy's option to show/hide bot posts because people could choose if they want to see it at all.

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[–] ohulancutash@feddit.uk 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It exists and some Lemmy communities operate that way. It’s not a good idea at all in practice. For example one community mirrors a tech support subreddit. It’s utterly pointless engaging in that community because the person asking the question will never read your answers. You can’t bootstrap a sense of community.

[–] icystar@lemmy.cif.su 1 points 1 day ago (3 children)

It probably doesn't make much sense to mirror /r/technology to /c/technology since that community is already popular and self-sustaining on lemmy.

There are countless other 'niche' communities that have no posts for months, however. There already isn't anyone engaging in these communities and it's unlikely that that will change because nobody wants to manually make posts that next to nobody is going to see. It's cyclical.

[–] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 12 points 1 day ago

True, but from experience, those cycles are not broken by bot posts. You then have a community full of crossposts with 0 comments. Try it if you like, but usually the reason for dead communities is a lack of interested people.

[–] ohulancutash@feddit.uk 1 points 1 day ago

Botslop is performative. Few would care to “join in”

[–] Sergio@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago

There are countless other 'niche' communities that have no posts for months, however.

Hey, have you seen !fedigrow@lemmy.zip? It's got a lot of discussions on how to handle this.

I think that to grow a niche community, you need at least 2-3 regular posters, and you need to make posts that encourage discussion (i.e. ask questions or provoke a thoughtful reaction that readers would like to share.)