If you want your community to grow, there's things you can do to help. Some of them are better than others. What are things that are good for the Fediverse, and what are some things that are better left on other platforms? Here's a few things and my opinions
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Clickbaity titles ("Liberals DESTROYED by LOGIC") - No thank you.
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Consistent posting - Yes. If you start a community, you'll probably be the only one posting on there for a while. It's easier to bootstrap a community if it's something that comes with content ready-to-go somehow to make your job easier.
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GIFs - I've been using this over in [email protected]. That's about as growth-hacky as I'd like to get, but I'm pretty sure people are more likely to engage with animated GIFs than static images for communities like that.
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Sources - I think this is something that can differentiate the Fediverse from other platforms. On my posts in [email protected], I've been spending time to source everything before posting it. This makes sure I don't accidentally post edited images that I've seen over in /r/outofcontextcomics, and makes the Fediverse show up in searches. That actually probably hurts growth a little bit, but IMO is worth it
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Transcribing - Another differentiator for the Fediverse. Everything's been done by hand and it's been great. I've been transcribing my posts in [email protected] and I've been very happy to see that search engines are already picking those up.
I wanted to keep [email protected] discussion-focused instead of just imagespam of otome game characters. I'm not budging on that but given this is the advice for growth, oof for potential growth. I do welcome memes about otome games, but just reposting someone else's fanart is against the rules. Posting your own is welcome.
One thing I always wanted more of out of anime/manga communities on Reddit was more discussion, less fanart I could easily find by just going on Pixiv—but each community was almost always imagespam.
I guess this puts me in the minority :(
On the other hand, Reddit's r/otomegames is the same way, there is more discussion than imagespam, so there is hope.
Recently, in [email protected], I configured the episode discussion bot to create posts using the poster art of the show rather than just an empty discussion post as a bit of an experiment about the effect of images. I don't have hard analytics to dig into, but I have noticed that the episode discussion threads have garnered significantly more votes when they have images, and a small increase in comments. Though, the additional comments are usually just wandering folks instead of people that stick around and engage.
I still don't let fanart in either the main anime nor manga community because it would too quickly spiral out of control. There is simply too much fanart in existence for these things. Instead, I limit it to official art only, which usually means teasers/posters/trailers. In the manga community, there is a bit of a special case in that I do allow fanart of a series if it was done by a different published author (not just some random pixiv user). This happens sometimes when a series ends and you get other authors drawing commemorative art for it.
Hey, thanks for the advice! I'll try to implement it when I can—some posts lend themselves better to images than others.
I admit I'm one of the wanderers. I pop in via Local from time to time because sometimes there is cool stuff, but I'm not subbed because otherwise stuff I'm not interested in would overwhelm my feed. A quick skim via checking in from time to time or Local works better for me.
I see you as a mod a lot around Lemmy. Thanks for your work!