Asklemmy

• Work it into the conversation when you're talking to people elsewhere (I don't mod any communities but am interested in seeing them grow and this has been the #1 successful tactic)
• Don't be weird about mentioning it in general. For example, why does this post not say what your community is or have a link for people to follow?
• Don't just post links that people can click on, think "huh" and then move on. Post questions or other interactive things to draw out lurkers.
• Team up with mods of related communities to maintain a list of "neighbours" that you all pin to make it easy for your users to find more stuff they're interested in.
• Make sure to respond to anyone who does happen to wander in and leave a post or comment, don't leave them hanging
• Advertise it on your other social media since presumably you're hanging around people with the same interests

Constant work. Such online communities have an exponential growth pattern. So you probably have a certain amount of time after which you double.

This is obviously very apparent when you have 10k subs, and on the next day it is 10,1k. But when you are at 10 subs it can take days for the next to arrive.

Just go on posting and the thing will start to take off. If you stop, or other active members stop the community might die.

You need to get at least one user on another instance to sub to your community manually. Before you do that, you will only be discoverable by users on the local instance. Once you get that first user, posts in your community will start appearing in "all" on that other instance.

After you get a sub from some other instance, regular posting will help users find you by just seeing posts from your community on their instance, and they can easily click the community name and sub to it.

Aside from this fediverse-specific quirk, @thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee already posted some good tips.

I think it just takes time. I’m also posting to a community that currently has 7 subscribers (and I think that includes me, haha) but I enjoy posting there since I care about the topic. Growth will come naturally, but I mostly care about exchanging ideas and just general conversation with other fans.

So what is your community and where is it? Advertise it, please. 😊

Make it easy to subscribe if someone is browsing from a different instance. For example, the link to the new communities sub Lemmy, I think if you leave off the protocol (https://) I could browse it via my instance and actually click the subscribe button.

I moderate (and was the creator of) !maliciouscompliance@lemmy.world . In 5 days it now has >4k subscribers. Some tips which helped me are:

• like other people mentioned, work it into a conversation (see what I did above?). It's especially important to do this on the larger instances where your community ISN'T located, because it doesn't show up organically for them until the first person subscribes. Find a thread to talk about it on lemmy.world, lemmy.ml and sh.itjust.works at minimum. Maybe kbin.social too.
• cross-posting in larger communities might help, since it helps others see that the community exists
• Post a variety of content - memes/stories that others can laugh at, more in-depth discussion threads, etc.
• engage with whoever posts. If someone replies, reply back to them. This helps to drive up engagement and makes the poster feel heard, which encourages more posts.

Without looking at your community that's the general advice I have.

Also - be prepared to shout into the void for some time. It takes time to gather momentum. You'll have to be that first person at a party pretending to dance by yourself while having a good time.

Good luck, and thanks for putting in this effort!

Remember that fedi is "multi-dimensional" in that we have both community subscriptions and account-to-account follows. When I follow someone from my kbin account, the threads they post and boost start appearing in my "microblog" feed, and that can lead to community discovery. So one way to grow the community is to build microblogging awareness by encouraging follows and boosts, using hashtags, etc. There are already hashtags being used on fedi - actually, let me test something out here and see if I can get it to show up elsewhere:

#mastodon

I would say look to other areas that might have some overlap in interest and point them in your direction.