Imma preface this by saying that I'm not an admin or mod here, these are just my thoughts & advice on the matter.
You've noticed that a community doesn't exist on Lemmy. I'm going to assume you've checked the community browser, and seen that that specific community doesn't exist. So, you've gone to communities, typed in the name, and are about to hit create.
Well, hold up a second. There's an INSANE amount of community spam going on in lemmy.ml, and it looks like it's starting here to a much lesser degree.
Some questions you should ask:
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Are you creating this community just to create it? By that I mean, are you willing to put in the work as the moderator if it does take off?
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Is it a niche community of a larger subset that has a thriving community or a completely new category?
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Are you willing to regularly post stuff to start seeding comments & advertise it in the relevant places?
If the answer to any of these is no, get your cursor off that create button and go join the bigger communities. It just makes it harder to find communities that aren't 100% dead when half of them are dead-ends created just because 'they exist on Reddit'. Once there are enough people are visiting !gaming@beehaw.org, they spill over into !rpg@lemmy.ml if they want more focused TTRPG stuff. Once there are enough people on !rpg@lemmy.ml, they'll spill over to my Shadowrun group. Lots of communities are fractal in nature, and people are skipping a few steps. The userbase needs time to grow and mature.
Please think before you make a community.
For something like that, I'd heavily recommend posting all your ASiP memes and shenanigans over in !television@lemmy.ml. Whenever that community gets too noisy (not gonna happen in a while), you can split it off to your own community.
For the NFL stuff, it's actually ok to have a duplicate I think, but the moderator's gotta be actively cross-posting to the other one for visibility
What's your opinion of lemmy.ml and beehaw? I saw some beehaw admins pissing and moaning about costs with the new uptick of users and a bunch of gatekeeping behavior.
To be frank, I think we need many more neutral default instances, because both lemmy.ml and beehaw strike me as insular communities with strong opinions about certain topics. They have been here significantly longer than me, and I think the relative obscurity of the platform was something they valued to some degree. I think they are nice enough people, but they do not seem prepared or willing to absorb a massive reddit influx of people from all different walks of life.