The NFL season is about to start and it would be nice to have as many people as possible participating on the communities from https://nfl.community. Being a topic-specific instance with closed registrations, I'm aware that it is harder to be discovered, so I'm writing here with the intent of both promoting a bit and to find enthusiasts joining in.
If you'd like to help the instance and the team communities grow, there are two ways to help:
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Join https://fediverser.network, find the Lemmy community you want to help and apply to become a Community Ambassador. Community Ambassadors can add different sources of content and also send invites to "good" reddit users to migrate.
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Become a moderator of your team community. The communities are still all low in traffic, so I guess the hardest part for the moderators will be in finding and posting the type of content that you'd like to see in the community, in order to set out its tone.
As always, if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask!
You just said content wasn't the problem:
It makes no sense that the blackout failed because of lack of content, since the content generation would have stopped on Reddit during the blackout. The backlash moderators got from their users for locking subreddits during the blackout was very telling. The reality is, people just don't care enough to switch if it doesn't affect them. And we know that % of people that used 3rd party clients was less than 5%, based on client download numbers it sat at around (6.9%, which counted users that just downloaded it once and never used).
Content can be a motivating factor in bringing in established posters, but even then it's more about the sunk cost fallacy than content. That's why converting lurkers into posters people is the way to grow new platforms. I'm the living proof of that, as I had 0 posts on Reddit.
And there were plenty of alternatives from established ones like Hacker News (founded in 2007) to new ones like Lemmy, Hive, Raddle, Saidit, who were all released before the Reddit changes were even announced.
I don't know if we are talking about the same thing when I say "content was not the problem".
What I mean is that people's objections to Reddit is not in the type of content that they could find there. Overall, people like the conversations they have there and they like the range of communities that were there. And none of the alternatives you mentioned stand on the same footing as Reddit, so there is no pointing in comparing them.