If you recall reddits growth many of their communities evolved as offshoots of a single generic community. This made it easier for people to see discussions they normally would not get involved in, and once the posts in a similar category reached critical mass it moved to a sub Reddit.
I think people are recreating their niche communities here but they are floundering since the user base is still pretty small. Maybe it’s best to post to the “big” communities until the time is right to move to smaller, targeted communities?
This uncontrolled rush killed magazines. For example /m/hardware. I wanted to start something, but it was already reserved by someone who never posted anything in a month, not a post, not a comment anywhere. There is no link to other mags on the page, no rules, no nothing.
I messaged the guy to get the magazine back but never got any answer.
In cases like this I think you should ask the instance admins to reassign it to you.
Why not try starting a magazine with a very similar name? I think the magazines are case sensitive so maybe m/Hardware
The name hardware was kind of a “catch all” to answer generic questions and to give exposition to other smaller niche magazines like monitors, memory, ssd, motherboards, datahoarders, homelab, you name it. Calling it something else would have defeated the purpose.
You might go with PC hardware. Just “hardware” could refer also to nuts, screws, and door hinges.
No one will type pchardware. But we could have added links to other non-IT magazines.
But on searches, if they type hardware, PCHardware will pop up because it has hardware in it.
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