If you create a community, please try and populate it with content. I see a lot of new communities with 0-1 posts from the mod. That’s not nearly enough to get people engaged - users are going to see that it’s a ghost town and leave.
If you have enough interest to create a community, you probably know something about the subject matter, so PLEASE add some posts (5-10 would be a good start). Maybe some questions to get people talking, even popular reposts from other sites. It sucks shouting into a void, but if you don’t do it, everyone else will also be shouting into a void.
Also please consider whether you need to create a community! When there are 100 million users of the site, there may be 1000 people who are interested in the same exact niche tabletop RPG as you, but there are <500,000 users here for now, so you’ll be lucky to find 10. Consider creating a thread in a broader community (like boardgames) until you have enough people talking in the thread that it gets messy - then it’s time to create a separate community.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I wonder if years of fleeing the front page to niche subs conditioned us all to try and make niche subs here when we should just be shooting the breeze right here on front street.
It feels so alien to actually put a run on sentence idea out and not parrot a meme.
That said I made some shit posts on one of the nichest of niche communities.
Agree with this sentiment. The night’s young here, so I think a little consolidation would do more to help us at this point in time
That’s very true. For example, a general “anime” community would be better, until it gets hard to keep track of what’s on the first page - after which some series could splinter off.
Its hard to get people to agree on this though. And I think the other extreme of not letting people create communities isn’t the best either.
I hard agree.
In fact, I’m finding that NOT focusing on these small interests, is largely more enjoyable of an experience.
I only have so many interesting things to say. I don’t really want to post for the sake of generating content, so making 5-10 posts right off the bat seems like the wrong way to go about it. I think it’d be better to make one post a day or one every other day or so that anyone who comes in can see that it’s recently active.
Yeah, you’re right, I’m going to try posting something at a daily cadence to build up content in the communities I made, and hopefully more people will join in.
The only way Lemmy can maintain its momentum is by generating original content.
I am trained in nonstop content generation for steemit.com and Hive.io where being a spammer was the key to success. I would post 100 comments a day and 1 post a day because that was the maximum amount of posts per day. Now on Lemmy it seems my spammy instinct came out and I comment and post dozens of times a day on multiple accounts. 🤐
But then why create a community then?
You can always at least post YT videos or links to articles so that people can see there’s activity on the comm and it’s not dead.
I made !vans@lemmy.world and I’ve been thinking about posting once a day so that I don’t exhaust my content to post, but is that enough? Should I try to make a couple posts a day?
r/vans is in the top 5% of subreddit size. I’ve got one subscriber other than myself! Haha
Another thought: making a community can also be a nice structured incentive to check in on your hobby regularly. I like looking for videos or articles to link to for my yugioh community even though there’s not many people subscribed - it gives me an opportunity to interact with and think about the game in different ways than I normally do.
Yes, when you the sole poster on thé community, it is almost like writing a blog. You’re doing something for you and showing the word the results. Maybe one day, people will like it enough to participate.
Yes. That’s why good literature and good philosophy community. It helps think and read. Also music community for what I listen to. Collaborative playlist hopefully. 🎶👌
An idea for people like me that still use reddit alongside lemmy, if you make a post on lemmy, post the lemmy link to the corresponding subreddit. That way if the post gets traction on reddit, all the clicks are leading them to the lemmy post
What might be a good idea is to spend a bit of time each week gathering content and then using https://github.com/RikudouSage/LemmySchedule to spread out the posting throughout the week. Then you can comment on it as it shows up on your feed.
Crossposting is also a good way to start. For example there is community like !lorraine@jlai.lu or !lyon@jlai.lu that focus on specific part of France. They have almost no original content but someone interested on Lyon’s local story may not be subscribe to all the community about tourist, politic, urbanism, activism, fun stories and so on that publish stories about this place.
Sounds like something AI would be good at.
Doesn’t matter how you do it - if you can figure out how to automate it, good!
I kind of hate that you’re right
I’ve created a new community /c/housing_bubble_2. How do I get it featured on newcommunities?
Just create a post about it
If you mean about getting it featured on LW, you should ask that to Lemmy.world admins
I wish more people understood this concept in general. Whether it be making communities on a network like this, making discord servers, or even starting a small business – many times my friends and acquaintances have tried to create something that relies on people to keep it alive, but give no one a reason to want to engage with their platform/service/etc, expecting there to be a flood of people out of nowhere that will cause the system to support itself.
Good talk, needs more exposure.
I joined the Glasgow community. I’m the only subscriber there!
Glasgow? My condolences.
Jk haha welcome to lemmy my dude
- If I created a community, would I become it’s (lone) moderator automatically?
- What consequences, requirements and things would I need to keep in mind as a moderator?
- Is it advisable to copy-paste content from Reddit to kickstart new communities (given that the link source to the original content was added as well when making new posts)?
f I created a community, would I become it’s (lone) moderator automatically?
Yes. But you can also immediatly appoint new mods and/or un-mod yourself if there are other mods present, so it is easy to give a community away when there are other interested users. It’s not a permanent thing.
What consequences, requirements and things would I need to keep in mind as a moderator?
Your community needs to be compatible wih the Fediverse Code of Conduct … but that boils down to “don’t be a dick and don’t post illegal stuff” which is pretty much just common sense. It’s not exactly hard to follow those rules ;)
Apart from that, you can set whatever rules you want. But keep in mind that the Fediverse is still a lot smaller than reddit, so if you are TOO niche / narrow / strict with the rules, you’ll have a hard time finding people who want to engage with your community. General, broad-themed communities with easy-to-follow rules have a bigger chance to thrive.
… and a personal little tip: don’t slam down the ban hammer at every opportunity. As a mod you are able to ban, silence, remove or otherwise “punish” people for bad behaviour, but that doesn’t mean that you have to do that. It’s a lot better to give users the benefit of the doubt, explain instead of punish (as they might not be aware that they did something bad in the first place), and give them a reasonable chance to fix their mistakes on their own before taking action. Post removal, bans and the like should be reserved solely for when the user in question is unwilling to cooperate OR did something obviously super shitty (like threatening other users, using slurs, posting illegal stuff etc.)
Is it advisable to copy-paste content from Reddit to kickstart new communities (given that the link source to the original content was added as well when making new posts)?
Well … as a last resort, yes. Original content or stuff from non-reddit sources is always preferable as it gives users of the Fediverse an incentive to visit communities here instead of going to reddit, but copypasted content is still better than no content at all, so if you can’t find interesting / worthwile stuff elsewhere, then copypasting from reddit is okay-ish too.
OC is still way better tho.
I understand the desire to automate this sort of thing and I can understand the utility at first but I think we should absolutely be afraid of that in long term use. Instead I think people should use the built in cross posting function to link conversations from different communities. I think this is a great way to build slow diffusion of communities into the fediverse.
See my post here for an example: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/217550
Yeah, automatic posts drive me away faster than anything. Good point on cross posting though, I just followed your advice. It’s pretty much free if your post fits in multiple places and there are lots of nearly empty communities right now.
Also to everyone creating a community, it takes time. Don’t get too discouraged if uptake is slow!
Yes, this can’t be stressed enough. Expect to be shouting into a void for 2-3 days. That’s the price of being an early adopter!
Might be weeks even, this sort of thing really can’t be predicted at the very early stages.
Thanks. I’ll try to kickstart mine once I have some free time.
