Creating a community is easy. Being the sole content creator and marketing your community until it becomes self-sustaining is very very hard. Moderating it once it becomes sustainable is moderately hard (pun intended)
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
65 points (98.5% liked)
Asklemmy
43898 readers
1271 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
A community? No, you just gotta be dedicated to starting conversations and promoting it.
An instance though? Can be hit or miss.
I keep seeing you pop up in comment sections. I almost finished my book last night just a few chapters left and I promise I'll post something to your instance to promote activity lol
Aw I appreciate it. Itβs all good, slow organic growth is better than unsustainable rapid artificial growth. I hope youβre enjoying your book and Iβd love to hear your thoughts on whatever it may be (and maybe add another book to my ever growing TBR π)
I'd be surprised if you hadn't read it already, it's Mort by Terry Pratchett. I've been meaning to start Discworld for ages but kept finding excuses and finally started my journey reading them in chronological release order. I really wish I started this series sooner. What an absolute delight it's been!
Itβs got such a nice domain!
Creating a community is super easy.
The initial moderation is also quite easy, though you need to dedicate some time to build the initial userbase and write clear, concise, reasonable rules.
What I can tell you from personal experience though is that maintaining a community after it grows is hard, and time consuming, and you'll absolutely need extra moderators and moderator tools.
Right now, today, on Lemmy no communities are big enough for this to be a concern. However, Reddit also started small. Be prepared.
Maintaining is the hard part. Feels like shouting in the abyss for a while.
Then unfortunately other people start to post as well
It's not difficult but you need perseverance to just get your head down and keep a trickle of content going in the hope that it'll gain momentum. That means you can't worry too much about initially being the only one posting to your community and you should make sure you have your newsfeeds up and running, and well trained, to keep feeding you potentially interesting links. Also keep an eye out for enthusiastic posters who does be potential moderators - as someone on here said: you can make a good poster a mod, you can't make a mod a good poster.
Maintaining a community is never easy
Yeah its hard. Finding interesting stuff to post and the consistency is tough.
Depends on the type of community. I am the PS5 community creator. There is constant news available for discussions but you have to be consistent and patient. For other types of communities it is probably harder to even generate content. It helps to make friends with other mods also if your community has "neighbors" so to speak. For me that would be other console communities and gaming communities.
If you're gonna start something like c/birdswitharms you're probably gonna have a harder time gaining traction.
Link to the community?
!PS5@lemmy.world
No not at all
I personally post relevant information to the communities I've created and moderate, but I'm not here to be an entertainer. I get a handful of upvotes so I guess it's useful to some people.
If Reddit fucks up even more I might have a bigger role, but so far it pretty feels like that Milhouse GIF playing frisbee with himself, and I'm sort of okay with that.
i guess so