How are you doing with your communities? : fedigrow

[–] anon6789 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

[email protected] has been getting some people posting things of their own lately and it's been really nice to see!

A couple people have submitted pics they've taken of owls they've encountered, and there's been some art and articles. Good variety of things.

I like it because I don't mind posting all the things as the content is pretty easy to get, but it's all coming from my taste and perspective on what is interesting, so it's good to see what I'm missing or overlooking, plus I like seeing people's real life experiences with nature.

I'd been feeling uninspired, and this has given me a big boost as it feels I've finally inspired some others to contribute. I'm happy to teach and answer questions, but seeing others take an active role in the growth of the community is truly something else. I want it to be a space for everyone to be happy and enjoy each other being there together looking at beautiful nature things.

Also I've been having decent luck incorporating more non-English speaking content. Got nice photos and stories from Kuwait, China, Slovenia, France, Germany and others rolling in now. It increases variety and perspective, and I like learning about the language and culture aspects from other users and from just reading and learning the terms to find the content. A German user also provided some links to German animal rescues for the sidebar links.

Comments feel a bit slower, but with all the other good, I'm not going to sweat that right now. Activity is still there overall.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Always nice to see superbowl on my homepage, thank you for creating it! :D

[–] anon6789 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Glad to hear that! I didn't start it, others beat me over here, but it was becoming inactive, and I didn't want to see that, so I am keeping it active until it can become self-sustaining.

Gave your Latin community a look. Only suggestion I'd make is if you're short on content, just post one thing a day until you pick up some more members so you don't use up all your material. I use an app that I can save drafts in, and I've built up a couple weeks reserve content in case I hit a dry spell. Now I can easily make 4 posts a day, but I worked my way up from 1 as I built up my stream of sources. Keep it active, but don't burn yourself out mentally or on ideas.

Other than that, building a community is really slow here, but it is worth it as there are some really good commenters here once you can land a few. You've got 200 subs in half a week, which sounds like a great start. Much like anything else, res = labori. Stick with it, maintain your happiness posting to it, and people will come to see you and hopefully share back. If you're having fun, that will attract people.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Thank you! my original goal was 3 posts a day, but that's more laborious than i thought (lmao) i think i'll diversify a little, maybe at least 1, at most 2 a day. An article and an etymology/meme post, depending on what i have.

As for the subscribers, i estimate it'll be ~130 by the end of this week, or the middle of the next (depends if i'm lazy or not). But the community had a very strong start; i remember creating it, going to the bathroom, then going back to my monitor 5 minutes later, seeing i had 35 subscribers already lol, i actually thought they were bots at first, but it seems not.

Building a community is much harder than i thought 😅 My original plan was to bootstrap a latin community, then once it becomes self sustaining, i'd only be a mod/commenter and not a poster, and focus on creating more communities, to expand the fediverse. I'll still try to do it, but it'll take me months. They will pass anyway, might as well have a cool latin community after they pass.

Thank you for the tips!

[–] anon6789 3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I never intended to be a poster, I'm normally moderately social at best, but the community was more important to me than maintaining my comfort zone was. When I was posting 1 or 2, I'd more actively go out into other communities to comment to try to get them active as well, but now I kinda get stuck enjoying the goings on at Superb Owl and I can sometimes forget about the other people trying to build their stuff. I don't know how people like Blaze with all these communities manage it all! The mega posters I assume just have a lot of time and like attention, but the actual work part of building the Fed is something else I feel.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Blaze with all these communities manage it all

I usually just repost good content from Reddit. That's the trick, there's no magic behind it 😅

[–] anon6789 3 points 2 weeks ago

Lol it's still work. As much of my stuff is largely reposts with some repacking and expansion, I know.

You maintain a ton of dialog with people too. You've definitely got something going on that isn't part of the majority of people here, and we're all grateful for that!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I don't know how people like Blaze with all these communities manage it all!

That's just because Blaze is omnipotent, and is somehow able to divide his attention into 50 separate communities. Unfortunately, my attention can only be focused on one thing at a time; sometimes i neglect Latin (i haven't posted anything at all yet, it's 5pm but I'm searching for content right now) I'd say I'm a pretty slow person mentally. Not in a bad way exactly, but i am very slow in everything i do, and that's pretty bad for the community 😄. And same, I'm a hermit/lurker most of the time, but maintaining a community really makes you feel apart of the fediverse, and makes me more active in general.

I have no idea how some people do it, i guess when the fediverse was fresh, young and unpopulated, everyone had an equal playing field; a popular community like [email protected] was very small back then, and was probably equal to a niche community. Unfortunately we are not early adopters :)

[–] anon6789 4 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

I think you're still an early adopter. Instances are still growing, there's still new communities every day, and I still think we're forming our identity as a media platform. We're getting pretty far from Lemmy's founding focused on communism, and becoming something diverse and unique. A lot of the copies of well established groups may be taken already, but they're not all so big a better version couldn't overtake them, and with federation it doesn't need to totally replace it, they can compliment each other. It's a different model of doing things and we're still learning to play to its strengths and weaknesses.

People are hearing about Bluesky in the news now, but I've yet to encounter and real life folk who have heard of Lemmy. That still makes it the uncharted waters of the internet to me!

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[–] serpineslair 10 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Promoted my [email protected] community on [email protected] for the first time. Gained ~10 subs.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I definitely read that as "trash metal" several times before getting it correct.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

You're almost on par with with [email protected], that's impressive

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Things could be better, i guess. on [email protected], after 3-4 days i managed to build a community of 76 followers! i'd say that's pretty good. But...

I'm the only one posting there, and whenever i try to encourage actual discussion instead of just posting memes/interesting facts about Latin, nobody is attracted to it. A little bummed, but it's still early days.

And i feel like i'm running out of content to hold their attention, and frankly it's a little stressing. I don't want the community to die before it even starts. It doesn't help the vacation just ended, and i'm more busy now.

I was actually going to post here asking for tips, but this thread was just created, so this is a good place to ask, i guess.

[–] wjs018 8 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Starting a new community is an uphill slog. Some tips and observations:

Make sure to subscribe to the community from several of the large instances so that it is federated there and people viewing the all feed can see it.
If you haven't yet, make sure to announce the community in [email protected] and/or [email protected]
If you can think of some kind of recurring post series, it is a good structure to provide a steady drip of content. For latin, maybe something like a weekly post about the etymology of a modern word with a latin root?
In general, posts with a lead image generate much more interaction than non-image, discussion posts. So, the meme-type posts can serve a role to help people discover the community.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Posting in [email protected] is almost mandatory. I saw a 100x activity on my comms once I posted there

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

I thought of #1, but it sounds weird to use my alts to subscribe to my own community 😅 I'll try to check if any large instances don't have any subscribers; if so, i'll make an alt an just subscribe.

I've promoted it on both, gotten me from ~35 -> 65, i'd say that's great!

And yeah, i like posting etymology, and i've done it; but it feels a little dirty posting other people's work, even if i credit them. I'll try to credit them harder, though; putting the name of the creator directly in the title, and making a post mentioning them. I think that's fair enough

And for the last point, i learned that the hard way. hours i've watched as my futile attempt at a discussion sit at 0 comments, yet my memes get 20-50 upvotes 😂

[–] anon6789 5 points 2 weeks ago

Make sure to subscribe to the community from several of the large instances so that it is federated there and people viewing the all feed can see it.

I never even thought about this, but it is an important and easy to overlook step in how federation works! Great tip for noobs trying to start communities and to more experienced users who aren't as attentive to how the fediverse actually works (guilty).

[–] serpineslair 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah it was like that for me for a while. You just have to try your best not to run out of ideas, really know your stuff and just persist, even when it feels like you aren't getting anywhere. And then every now and then, you will manage to engage a great contributor, who decides to post regularly, taking some of the load off yourself. If you continue to persist anyway, eventually more will come, creating enough of a community to engage in light discussion. I am sorta at that point with [email protected]. I have a couple other great regular posters, one of which posts daily, which helps me to reach an even bigger audience (effectively having double the content). Now I have plenty of content, I just need to keep at it, and keep the place alive and with time it should hopefully grow naturally.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Wow, you've been posting for 2 years, I've only been doing so for 3 days 😅 and somehow, I've already gotten 76 subscribers (excluding my alts for federation) it seems the bottleneck is myself; I'll devise a schedule of posts for myself, and hopefully that'll encourage people to post.

I'm more into hard metal myself, but your community seems great! Good luck with it!

[–] serpineslair 3 points 2 weeks ago

Thanks!

[–] wjs018 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I haven't been able to post as much this past week compared to normal, but things have been going ok:

[email protected] is actually kind of booming right now with the start of a new season of shows. I have seen lots of first-time commenters chiming in on episode threads. It actually hit ~300 users/day at one point over the weekend.
[email protected] has been calm but active. There are a handful of other fairly reliable posters that have been able to keep things going while I have been away.

The not as active ones:

[email protected] - I inherited this community when the previous moderator had to step away for an extended period of time. The nokotan community in general is very meme-heavy, and I just don't really know how to engage with that very well. There is only so much non-meme content about the series. So, I am going to try to binge-read the manga and start posting chapter discussion threads when new chapters are released. I just need to find the time to do that.
[email protected] - This is another kind of special case. The current, most active Gundam community is [email protected]. However, that instance announced that they are shutting down later this month. The current users over there were interested in setting up a new community but there wasn't anybody that wanted to moderate. So, I offered my help in that respect. It just started this past week, so there isn't much there yet, but I am going to try to keep posting any Gundam-related content I find over there.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I can try to help a bit with Gundam!

[–] wjs018 3 points 2 weeks ago

Fantastic, thanks! I haven't made announcements yet about the new community, but hoping to do that some time this week when I get a chance.

[–] DaMonsterKnees 6 points 2 weeks ago

The pikas will return. My mental health just hit the floor, and I've been struggling. Hope things are better for y'all.

[–] BallShapedMan 6 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Not great, no idea how to grow a continuity clearly. https://lemmy.world/c/cars

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

[email protected]

Let me have a look

[–] BallShapedMan 5 points 2 weeks ago

I was wondering how to link like that, thank you!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

Have you tried promoting it on [email protected] and [email protected] ?

You could also start weekly discussion threads just to get the ball rolling, people are usually more comfortable commenting than posting

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Routine

[email protected] still good
[email protected] is still competing with [email protected], but I guess that will be the same for a while
[email protected] gets some upvotes

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

All of them are working as intended, can't ask for much more than that. I don't think it's healthy to get caught up in subscribers and all that too much. Things are generally trending positively, good enough for me.

There's been a disappointing uptick in negative interactions on the fediverse lately (IMO) and that's more disturbing to me than community numbers. Some (again, IMO) questionable decisions are being made in some of the larger places on the fediverse but a lot of it is users taking it as a challenge or a right of passage to get banned from communities or instances so they can meme and rant about it. It's silly behavior and we can do better than this.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Still posting daily on [email protected] still getting barely any traction on anything and still have barely any engagement.

Still not too bothered either though. It's a very niche subject on a niche platform and I'm happy posting into a void, I know a few people stop by and that is enough for now :)

[–] Alphane_Moon 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

EDM subs on lemmy are generally in a pretty poor state (progressive / trance / D&B). I occasionally contribute via another account, but it feels like there just isn't a critical mass yet.

I will join [email protected] and occasionally post too.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

You can maybe start a weekly thread "What have you listened to / discovered this week"?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

I have considered this but have yet to try it out yet, I should try at least, see if I get any responses :)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Trying to get [email protected] more active, small success so far

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

[email protected] really starting to overthrow [email protected]. Pinging the last few posters on the midwest.social to the post helps.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

Been trying to get some life into [email protected], but it's been slow growing the subscriber count. I'm really happy to see [email protected] has picked up its own momentum and is getting content beyond just my posts.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I really enjoy the board games community!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

Thank you for board games, it's nice!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I really liked the idea of LongReads but never subbed because most of the posts were depressing long reads.

Checked now and I'm happy to see that alongside peoples' insurance getting cut off, something about Trump, and something about abortion, there's articles about knots and Guitar Hero.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

!news_[email protected] has been getting some decent engagement all posts get a couple of votes and some have bewn getting decent commenter engagement.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

[email protected] has 72 subscribers and my posts are getting a decent amount of votes and a few comments. Not bad for a 5 day old community!

[email protected] is pretty chill, just me posting pics of my dog I don't expect that to go anywhere. It's just for fun.

Fedigrow