Hey everyone! Preston here. As The Possum Patio has already started growing a surprising amount since I set it up last week, I wanted to put some thoughts down on what the instance is right now, where it might be going, and some other general background info.

Background

Like many of you, I am (was?) a longtime user of Reddit - going on 13 years for me. The site was always an excellent time-waster and source of entertainment, but a couple years in I realized what really made reddit special to me were the niche communities. With old school forums generally going defunct over the past 20 years, Reddit was The Place to find discussions on that one weird niche JRPG nobody’d ever heard of, or find a fandom of some show that finished airing years ago. All those niches were what Reddit was to me, and as the site continues down the path of enshittification it’ll be sad to see those niche spaces slowly decay over the coming years.

So! Reddit drama aside, the ethos of having niche communities is what I want to focus on for this Lemmy instance. The larger instances have the big umbrella topics already covered - I’m not interested in hosting (or moderating) a politics or general gaming community. I want to curate spaces that get into weird niche topics that I (and maybe you!) care about, spaces that seem to be missing from the larger Fediverse as of right now.

Communities

Right now, The Possum Patio hosts 8 communites:

Currently, new community creation is disabled. Moderating and maintaining communities requires effort and time commitment from volunteers, and for now the only mods are myself and @brycethemilkman.

For now, I’m going to limit the total number of communities we host to around 10 or so. If we continue to grow I’d certainly consider expanding that number.

One last thought on communities - as the general Lemmy/Kbin userbase grows over the next few months, some of our communities might get pretty huge, some might not see much traffic or another “default” community for that topic may crop up elsewhere. Both of those things are good! I don’t want to assert sole ownership over these spaces, I’ll be happy whatever with whatever instance they find as a home.

Closing/Questions

Thanks for reading my rambling if you made it this far! I’m excited and honestly a bit nervous about the positive reception the instance has gotten - some of you were very flattering in your registration responses. 😊

If there’s any questions or concerns you have, throw 'em down in the comments. As mentioned above, I’m open to creating about 2 more communities (maybe more if I really like the ideas) so feel free to suggest some.

-Preston