this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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Fedigrow
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19 users here now
To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
Resources:
- https://lemmy-federate.com/ to federate your community to a lot of instances
- [email protected] to organize overall fediverse growth
- [email protected] to keep tabs on where new users might come from :)
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Community discovery 100% needs to be improved somehow. No matter how many popular posts you make you will heavily struggle getting the ball rolling, if you ever do.
This practically guarantees the death of niches, which is [obviously] not good for the fediverse as a whole.
Don't people use the Subscribed feed for their niche communities? So once they are subbed, it's all good?
If the issue is people not knowing about communities, then those posts on [email protected] should help
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule influences this heavily imo
I think it's both. On latin for example i have 120 users (35 are lemmy federate bots) but i'm the only one posting there, despite some posts getting a lot of upvotes or comments.
This can heavily discourage mods and force them to quit which kills the community.
I'm coming up on 1,000 subscribers, 500 posts, and 1.5+yrs of content creation in my bandes dessinées sublemmy, with myself being responsible for maybe 85-90% of total content creation. Your concerns are real and valid IMO.
Soon I plan to set up a bot to post small, 'drip-like' content every other day, supplementing the off-days with my beefier content, which are generally small reviews and content roundups. I guess my point is that it's good to keep trying different techniques out, asking this and other communities for ideas, and having requisite patience.
Also, I think light-handed advertising across various platforms probably helps. Imgur and Reddit have worked okay so far, but frankly I need someone to help with other social media joints. That's something an active mod could potentially help with...
My reflex moving over was to subscribe to everything I’m interested in and never use all, because I’ve never used it on reddit.
This created a problem where since lemmy’s sorting all basically sort by most popular (except scaled but that sort is problematic for other reasons), I basically only saw the meme and news communities I subscribed to on my feed and the niche stuff never made it.
I know @[email protected] is working on an algorithmic alternative [email protected] but it’s not got support on any apps.
I usually use scaled for my subscribed feed and it works decently. Recently was advised to try out "newest comments" sorting for the subscribed feed and I like that even more!
have you tried Scaled sort? I use Scaled for my subscribed feed and it does a great job showing new posts in niche communities
Yes, I have several accounts due to that issue. Comes back to the lack of personal feeds mentioned elsewhere.
Not everyone follows that though
Then I'll keep posting about it everywhere I guess
Just followed it
Oh! Today I learned about community promo. Yeah, I guess we could use awareness raising about the existence of that community. Sounds like an awesome resource.
I posted it on [email protected], is this were you heard about it?
I'll probably post on [email protected] next week, and probably [email protected] as well.
Maybe create a meme about it on [email protected] too.
Is this a community discovery issue, though? If it's a popular post in an unpopulated community, people must be seeing it. So, it doesn't sound like an issue with impressions.
It's an issue with conversions. With visibility not translating unto subscriptions. And that's a totally different problem. If I see a post in Local or in All, and it's interesting, I'll upvote it, but that's not going to get me to subscribe. For that, I need to a) be interested in the community topic according to its name (because I am not clicking into the community), and b) I need to see multiple interesting posts from that community. And if those thresholds are reached, and I subscribe, that doesn't secure my engagement. Just that you'll show up in my Subscribed feed.
All of those are hurdles for a nascent community, and neither are a discoverability issue.
There could definitely be better ranking options for feeds, but if the posts in question are already "popular", that doesn't seem to be the issue.
I guess fxomt misphrased "how popular". You can have a "quite popular" post for your community (let's see, more than 100 upvotes), it will probably never break through the rest of the posts as people generally use Top Day or 12 hours.
Frontpage on LW is currently at 400 for the latest post: https://lemmy.world/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&sort=TopDay
😆
But this what I meant, yes.
Sorry, edited!
Yes those are points I forgot to mention. And the first one was what I meant.
People will only see it if someone from their instance is subscribed to that community though, so even popular posts don't necessarily reach the All feed.
https://lemmy-federate.com/ solves that for most of the instances.