this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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Fedigrow

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To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks

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I'm not gonna lie, sometimes it feels a bit lonely. I try to post on a few generic communities

Sometimes I can be the only poster for a few weeks. Makes me requestion the relevance of posting at all. I started posting to !pics@lemmy.world recently just because at least my posts are widely seen, and other people post there as well.

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[–] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 16 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I don't like "big" instances, since they tend to quickly walk back on their promised goals once they no longer can manage their size. So when I joined Lemmy it was on a smaller now defunct vlemmy.net instance. The idea of operating and moderating the community was not that appealing, but it was a way to promote the instance, so I started !globalnews@vlemmy.net and !databreaches@vlemmy.net. It was a slow start, but they grew over time, reaching 1000/400 subscribers respectively and then the admin killed the instance and vanished. That was a lesson.

After that, I joined lemmy.zip, it was tiny then, but it had a lot of things going for it, multiple admins, multiple communication channels, transparent finances and good base rules. What it lacked was content. So I had to decide if it was worth my time to start over by creating another community and help it grow. I re-started !globalnews@lemmy.zip and !databreaches@lemmy.zip and just started posting without any expectations. It was an outlet to share what I found interesting or what caught my eye. Eventually, people started commenting, and organic discussions started happening. I expanded the number of communities I moderate now, but the principles are the same. No expectations.

So the reason for all this backstory is that I stay motived by believing in the project and wanting to help good instances to grow. If not for Lemmy I wouldn't be posting anywhere else, never moderated on Reddit, never even posted on Reddit, was a habitual lurker there.

Just find topics you are interested in, maybe set up an RSS client and share the content that you find interesting yourself.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 6 months ago

Thanks for sharing your experience. I see your posts every day, impressive

[–] UKFilmNerd@feddit.uk 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's a little disconcerting when I post stuff and people (I assume) down vote it because they can't be bothered to read past the headline.

I posted a video to an almost dead Tron community with Joseph Kosinski talking about Tron Legacy being released in 4K.

But, again, I assume, because the video thumbnail and description was all about Top Gun Maverick...⬇️👇⬇️👇⬇️

[–] Blaze@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 6 months ago (3 children)

I chose my current instance because they disable downvotes for this reason. At least it's one less vector of negativity

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[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I'm kind of giving up. When I came over during the Reddit APIpocolypse, I tried to post as much as I could. My posts here don't get much engagement, and only seem to reach a small audience, so it doesn't feel like it's worth the effort.

I still try to post and comment, but it feels like a slog sometimes.

[–] misk@sopuli.xyz 3 points 6 months ago

Don't ever think it's up to you or any individual to carry the success of Lemmy or individual communities. Post what you think is worth sharing and don't force yourself if you don't feel like it. If Lemmy is to be more popular it will be on the backs of many people collectively.

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[–] Emperor@feddit.uk 5 points 6 months ago

It's never bothered me - I talk to myself a lot anyway.

[–] darakan@lemm.ee 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I started moderating !animation@lemm.ee about two weeks ago. I don't feel demotivated so far because it's still early days and I think it's a fairly niche topic. Especially among Lemmy's somewhat older userbase. On top of that the subscriber count has more than tripled during that time so I'm pretty happy with that. The one thing that frustrates me are the occasional random downvotes. I'm certain most of them are just by people not subscribed. I kind of wish there was a way to set it up so only subscribers to the community could downvote.

The 1 post that got a huge amount of traction and a lot of fun conversation (even though some of it was off topic) was a discussion question in the form of a meme. I wanted to try it out because on the ALL feed, the majority of the most popular posts are memes. It's not something I want to do too often because I don't want that to be the focus, but I'll probably do it from time to time in the hopes of getting more people engaged. And maybe pull some more subscribers.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Hello,

Welcome here, thank you for your comment, happy to see that your community is doing well. I'll add a link to the sidebar of !movies@lemm.ee

[–] darakan@lemm.ee 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Oh awesome. That's very nice of you. I've done the same.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 6 months ago

Thanks! I'll probably do a small post about it later this week (Sunday tends to bit a bit slower on Lemmy)

[–] p5yk0t1km1r4ge@lemmy.world 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I don't mind the slower nature of lemmy. I like how quiet it is compared to the karma farming spam bot hell reddit was.

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (12 children)

I haven't been posting / commenting as much recently because I've been busy with life stuff, but I do like seeing the posts (ex. I enjoy seeing the Lego posts). It would be nice to have more comments, but otherwise I usually upvote or save the post

One thing I've noticed is that even on Reddit, there are more posts with lots of upvotes and no comments. I'm not sure why that is

I'm planning to get posting again, but what I've found is that a lot of posts in the niche communities didn't go anywhere. Then every now and then a post takes off and a lot of people see it.

Best is when other people start posting too (ex. !publichealth@mander.xyz ). I guess it takes time for an active contributor with similar interests to find the community, since others might not encounter enough content outside of Lemmy to post them

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[–] mojo_raisin@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Ah, I really enjoyed interestingasfuck at the other place, I posted one just now, I'd like to see that community succeed.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 6 months ago

Thanks! Hopefully it will!

[–] insomniac_lemon@kbin.social 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I posted some stuff and ran into this plus my threads not getting federated to certain places. And 3 weeks later they are still the newest posts on those communities (Kbin's ps1graphics and blender communities, note that Kbin communities seem to not use the community link format).

I had some technical questions and a roadblock too, but they are niche so I just... didn't deal with it. Maybe there's an instance out there that'd fit (for me, someone who dabbles in art and programming while not really being those things), but also I doubt it particularly because I'm only interested in a semi-niche programming language. Audience vs niche seems like an unwinnable balance.

I've thought about posting to a more popular lemmy.world community for the next thing I make as it would probably get more of a response, but probably not answers so that wouldn't matter since the stuff I made so far was just random objects. Well, I guess getting answers for Blender questions is more likely.

[–] Blaze@reddthat.com 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Hello,

Welcome here! Did you try !blender@lemmy.world? Seems reasonable active, and with a 2.5k userbase.

But yes indeed, it's sometimes difficult to find the audience for a niche topic, general topics do better on average

[–] insomniac_lemon@kbin.social 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I haven't, the other community I was thinking of is !artshare which has 3.94K subs.

My style is low-poly with vertex colors (no textures). My Blender questions weren't really that important, the roadblock I am having is trying to use said models in a specific framework (or maybe the very specific bindings I'm using) just not loading vertex colors (I am not sure if there is 'help' here, aside from just fix it).

[–] Blaze@reddthat.com 1 points 6 months ago

Artshare is quite active, I would give it a try

[–] bradorsomething@ttrpg.network 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

These things take time. I’ve saved discords in the past by making interesting comments or posts that created conversations. Lemmy is growing, and quality content attracts quality content.

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[–] ThisIsNotHim@sopuli.xyz 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Part of the problem may be lack of tagging and filtering tools.

For example:

I'm not interested in memes so if a community is largely filled with them, my only way to avoid them may be to block the community. This includes communities that I might otherwise subscribe to, or want to engage with.

This is also tied into community fragmentation, community discoverability, and feeling the need to browse All to see anything. I don't know how widespread my issue is, but I have seen others mentioning having extensive block lists of communities.

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[–] can@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 months ago

I don't mind. We're still early adopters here really. I see it as slowly building a stronger place for people to find in future exoduses.

[–] cactusupyourbutt@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

op, from someone who browses /c/all, I frequently see your posts, so thanks, keep on keeping on

[–] Blaze@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 6 months ago

Thank you for your comment!

I do this for a few sublemmys like !nasa@lemmy.world and !esa@feddit.nl. I view it as keeping communities on "life support" until Lemmy grows a bit more.

One of the best practices I can think of is to cross-post a post with text in the body (important) from a small sublemmy to a large sublemmy. This creates a link to the original post on the smaller community, and gives it some visibility.

[–] Mr_Mofu@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I feel having a balance between more popular and widely used communitys as well as smaller and nicher ones work pretty well for me, where I admin 3 rather popular and broad communitys and 3 small and very niche ones. That way it just feels like more is happening yknow?

I also can only recommend utilising a Post Schedueler and making 1-2 weeks worth of posts at a time! When you manually post daily, it does feel pretty lonely, but if you do all the work in a few hours for 2 weeks like I usually do, it really does feel less like shouting into a void since you aren't actively posting per say that way

[–] Blaze@reddthat.com 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Balance is an interesting approach, I kind of have it too without realizing it.

The post scheduler can help, but in my case I like to see how the post is received in real time ha ha

[–] Mr_Mofu@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 6 months ago

I mean, the posts are usually schedueled for the same time with 5 minutes apart. I always look forward to letting them all post and then looking over them all at once!

[–] shortwavesurfer@monero.town 1 points 6 months ago

I shout into it more and hope that one day the void will answer back. It works occasionally. For example, I moderate a T-Mobile US community and started it off at zero and it's got over 200 subscribers now. Most posts still don't get comments, but there are some that do, and sometimes conversation even occurs or is beginning to anyway.

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