Gaming, news, tech, general literature. All of these are somewhat thriving, with a steady influx of posts and comments. At the same time, the userbase is sorely lacking for more niche communities. In my case it’d be stuff like poetry, yoga, religion, linguistics, meditation. Or many other communities I’d doubt they’d form a larger userbase here, at least to the degree that it’d foster good discussions. Communities where there are a larger amount of “normal people”, that are not tech-aware, and who have no interest in migrating off centralized corporate solutions. That just want a large space to discuss what they’re interested in.
This for me at least, makes it hard to completely leave reddit (or even Facebook and their groups!). Do you think the fediverse will ever reach the point where this would become a non-issue?
No, what I want is r/RPG - a single, central hub for RPG-related topics. Yes, there are also subs for RPGDesign, DnD, DM advice, etc., but RPG serves as both a central community and as a hub for all those more specific groups. There is no way to have a “hub community” on the Fediverse, or to efficiently find all groups which share interests. Groups which had a “largest community” on Reddit will now find themselves shattered and separated. Sure, you can say Federation will save them, but it really won’t. All federation means is that now instead of one community, there’s one per server, and you have to know to subscribe to each and every one of them.
Sure, there’s Mastodon’s Lists feature, which works like a Multireddit, but that’s honestly a lot of effort, and doesn’t cover Lemmy or kbin posts like this one. We need a way to automerge common communities, at least in the user’s view.
What you want never existed in the first place. Not only because of those other subreddits you mention, but because Reddit was not the entire sum total of RPG discussion on the Internet. The RPGNet Forums, TheRPGSite forums, RPG PUB, EN World forums, RPG Codex, and innumerable other smaller forums were scattered all around the Internet. You never saw them or their content because none of them are “federated”, and so you thought Reddit was the center of the RPG universe.
We now have an opportunity to restructure how diverse separate fora like that can work. If they were all federated then you’d be able to seamlessly view content from all of them, and communicate back without needing to have a separate login at each and every one of them.
If you really want to continue treating /r/RPG as the center of the universe and ignoring all the other fora, well, these new ones on the Fediverse merely add a few more onto the enormous list you were already unknowingly ignoring.
I was actually on the RPGNet forums for several years, but the topics, mechanics, and games which I care about became less-discussed over time.