My new thing is im trying to gradually reduce my topic specific questions in catchall Ask comms like this and instead submitting to the actual community that concerns it

Itll be slow but hopefully that can meaningfully shift my own stuff to help beef up the existing topical comms, if everyone does something similar we may actually get somewhere.

Sometimes im just gonna post here cuz its easier and people sort of know my deal already but i do intend to try to put things where they belong in hopes of making Lemmy more like that in terms of stronger non-centralized topical comms that are more likely to have domain-experts or at least more knowledgeable than is likely to be found in general purpose Asks

Exactly. I haven’t seen either a woodworking or sewing project over here since I joined, as one example.

No terrible first attempt at dovetails, no probable not first attempt at macarons, no woman wearing the sweater she just knit from alpaca wool.

And books. If I wanted a new scifi book here, I’d likely get 0-1 responses. There’s no book community here.

Exactly. You can find an active subreddit for fucking anything. Find a new anime and want to discuss it? There’s an active sub for that. Find a cool bug and want to identify it? There’s an active sub for that. Want to ask a doctor for casual (off-the-record) medical advice? There’s an active sub for that.

But with Lemmy, the first would probably land in a more generic c/Anime, while the latter ones might struggle to find an appropriate community at all. Because even if the specific communities exist, the chances of them being active enough to get a response are low.