this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2022
15 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43394 readers
1294 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think the only way is to start a community and care/animate it. Even with several hundreds of people, instances aren't really lively. But we're responsible for this. If we offer regularly quality content, some people will come and stick around. In 2 words: provide value.
I've been browsing around a lot of communities on practically all known lemmy servers. Some communities or instances provide regular content, several times a day, for months or years. Still no upvotes, discussion or visibility.
Why? Well, how do people "come by" before they stick around? They have to actively browse every single instance and hunt down anything that isn't already "mainstream" enough for other users to already subscribe to the community and pull it to the instance.
The complete lack of organic sharing when it comes to communites is a big hold-back. If lemmy-instances automatically shared all ~~instances~~ edit: communities with eachother instead of just the ones individuals subscribe to it would be much easier to gain visibility by "offering regular quality content" because more posts equals more visibility.
For the majority of communities at this time, regularly posting content is regularly shouting into the void.
You got me curious! Could you share some of your hidden gems of lemmyverse: has <10 subs and posts quality content at least once a month?
What one consider quality content is very subjective, but one example could be https://exploding-heads.com/c/digitslfreedom with 400+ posts, 6 users per month, 3 per week, 1 per day. 5 posts last 24 hours. 19 subs tbf, but very little activity beyond the occasional upvote.
NRSK's own communites like https://nrsk.no/c/norway and https://nrsk.no/c/videos are two other communities who posts largely extraordinarily good content (me practically being the only poster could be relevant to this statement) on a regular basis. Yet the only "significant" growth I've seen is directly related to advertising the community by crossposting, mentions and in other ways actively pushing it on others.
Of course it could be due to most others consider it low quality, but I believe the lack of visibility is a bigger factor.
Isnt this similar to Reddit? There I also found interesting communities mostly when other people recommended it, and not through some kind of algorithm. If you just got a list of all federated communities, most of them would probably be dead or irrelevant.
That's one way of doing it. The way I found the most interesting and nichΓ© subreddits was by hanging out in /all/new.
That seems to be the current status quo on lemmy. When you browse your homeinstance's federated communities or visit a different instance and list their local communities, it seems there's not very much logic to the sorting. There's no way of sorting them by i.e. activity.
That's why I go to /all/new on lemmy as well. I see every new post to every federated community. It's a gauge of activity and I see communities I didn't know existed because other users subscribed to them and pulled them in.
The ideal /all/new for me would show new posts from all communities.