I’ll just be honest, from my perspective on lemmy everything outside of porn, linux and shitposts is lacking. Interaction outside the top of hot is a wasteland of non-existence, questions go undiscovered, comments are never read. We could all be more generous with upvotes to improve visibility.

For me sfw art communities, sports, and life protips would all be nice to see grow. I miss the old photoshopbattles too, but I think that’s just fallen out of style in general.

AskHistory or something similar.

Probably not very popular, I miss the culture of r/morbidquestions that was the place to go for most weird topics without much judgment.

Terrariums. I love miniature things, including tiny ecosystems. There’s a few communities on Lemmy, but they’re mostly inactive, and have a tiny amount of subscribers.

Command and conquer, OpenTTD and OpenRCT2. Also Linux audio production

Seeing as this thread is still active, instead of continuing to reply to people throughout, gonna go ahead and put this out here.

If you’re not finding an active community for something (safe for work, that is) or any community whatsoever for your interest, you’re welcome to post about the topics that interest you in !general@lemmy.world till you find enough likeminded people to get a separate community going. This was always allowed tbh, but I’ve tried to make it more explicit and clear that it’s cool.

For me, it’s any community of Tradespeople. I can find relevant manufacturer and adjacent code regulations for modern equipment or building techniques anywhere online. The problem comes from obscure-ancient technology that was discontinued 60+ years ago, the only references to those are on Reddit and very specific forums.

I recently ran into an electrical panel that was built in the 60’s and was promptly made illegal (split bus residential panel, no singular main disconnect switch). Even being trained and educated as an Electrical Engineer, it only gave me the ability to understand what the panel was doing, not the history and use cases of the past (since their use in residential applications is obsolete). I was able to find discussions between inspectors and electricians, how things played out with local authorities, and the on going debate of their practicality by actual professors discussing regulations and safety. I will miss these resources if they become unavailable at a future date (the whole enshitification process).

That being said, places with higher than average traffic (like reddit now) tend to give a lot of crappy answers. Lot’s of diy’ers thinking their way is best (whether it’s code compliant or not), and others who don’t care about discussion and only want to say you’re doing it wrong because it’s not how they would do it (and nets them the highest profit margin on a job). There’s lots of owners out there that are probably afraid to ask a question now adays because of the responses (same linux community effect), even though the information around it could be important.

I miss the nonsexual nudes groups from Reddit, Normalnudes and NakedProgress.

Also wish the curly hair group here was active.

It’s ok though, trading off for the smaller community here, it’s still better.

Nonsexual/therapeutic manual therapy/massage/bodywork page with research, techniques, theory, etc. anytime I try to find one, I only get porn ones.

Tbh I wish the Lego communities on Lemmy were more active, aside from critiquing the odd announcement for a new set.

simracing

There are some communities, but they are not very active.

Research paper reading groups.

A lab work group, like that one on Reddit. I cannot remember the name and I sure as hell will not go to that damned site, but it was basically full of graduate students and technicians that shared stories from their labs.

I miss weird niche creative silly roleplay reddits like

r/vxjunkies

r/enlightenedbirdmen / r/madmudmen

r/earth999

r/nsfwworldbuilding - mostly bees with boobs

Bicycle communities