A lot of country- or city-specific subreddits either aren’t on here or are quite inactive. To be honest they were mostly cesspits on Reddit so maybe it’s no bad thing but you occasionally found useful information there.
Other than that, there were a few subreddits that were good for recipe ideas, like /r/EatCheapAndHealthy. /r/ZeroWaste was good too, on occasion.
In general, non-tech related communities don’t seem to have migrated over as much. Most of the subreddits I followed were related to technology in some way and now have pretty active communities on Lemmy.
Many communities exist, but mostly on paper.
What I haven’t found yet is something substantial and informative like /r/askhistorians.
Be the change you want to see. I noticed that every time I post even a small thing on those empty communities, people come and contribute.
It’s mostly an empty dancefloor issue, nobody wants to be the first
The other day I linked an interesting perspective on AI on !bestoflemmy@lemmy.world , hopefully those kind of exchanges happen more and more
It really depends. Something like askhistorians is probably big enough for it to work. For the vastly smaller communities where I try to do that, the dancefloor looks as I like it IRL: empty besides me. It’s less of an empty dancefloor problem, and more that the 1% rule often means you are a part of the 1%, and the other 1-percenters stayed on reddit.
On paper? Wtf? I don’t see that taking off. Is it a paranoid privacy thing?