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?

  • Doll_Tow_Jet-ski@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    Hi there. I wasn’t in the linguistic community in Reddit, but I am a linguist and I would be willing to create one here and moderate it. Linguistics is very broad. What were the topics discussed in the reddit community? I am a psycholingusit, so the focus of my contributions would be mostly in that field, and I imagine mostly scholarly content being shared and discussed, but I would like to know what someone like you, who used to be a member, would expect from such a community.

    EDIT: There’s already one! : https://kbin.social/m/linguistics

    • curiosityLynx@kbin.social
      3·
      1 year ago

      The posts I saw fell into these rough categories:

      • Sharing articles that are interesting or important to know
      • People asking questions about linguistics (a frequent one was people asking about what some kind of feature is called in the field, kind of “what do I have to search for to learn more about this?”)
      • Linguistic studies that were featured in general media (as long as neither the study nor the media coverage is garbage)
      • Stickied FAQ post and a regular general questions post
      • People sharing their own work that they think others might find interesting
      • Podcast episodes and YouTube videos about linguistics that are worth promoting

      I think the only things related to linguistics that weren’t welcome were posts where people come up with folk etymologies, spreading disproven theories or claiming one language being superior than another.

      Conlanging: You’d sometimes see questions about linguistics in general (usually typology) by a conlanger, but I don’t think I ever saw anything other than that. I would guess that links relating to conlangs/conlanging were deleted, with a suggestion to post them to /r/conlangs instead.