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.
deleted by creator
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 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.
Thanks! All i can do is try to mention it where I can, and hopefully more people will see this.
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
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. 🤐
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. 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. 🎶👌
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.
What is hard too, is if all the posts to get things started are the mods or creator, the same ghost town might occur. It’s hard to tell or know what will be interesting to get people talking so to speak. Some should also be put on the subscribers as well who also have an interest. It’s a double edge sword sometimes.
Yes, but if you don’t know what people would find interesting, neither would the first few subscribers. It’s better to have at least some stuff there (even if it’s all posted by you).
made several for my own interests. a few are just me. a few have thousands of subs. who knew?
You used the “cats” cheat code 😄
had a few cat pics I wanted to post. 2 days later thousands of ex-reddit subs. up,up,down,down,left,right,left… recruited more mods. never was a redditor
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.
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.
Very true.
Its not about how popular it is, its about having a space to talk to fellow like minded people.
Great idea, I posted my own photography work here and people joined afterwards. https://lemmy.world/c/macrophotography
Tip for those creating new communities: don’t slam your fresh community with loads of new posts all at once. Pace yourselves. Create 2 or 3 new posts initially. Then over the next day pop a new post every few hours.
The net result is the same (content!), but you greatly reduce the risk of people blocking your community. I look a lot in local, sorting by new. And when my feed is deluged by posts for the same brand new community, I tend to block that community because it’s smells like spam. And I’m probably not alone in doing this.
Good advice indeed
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
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.
I make an effort to comment on interesting posts or links I appreciate! But I haven’t had much in terms of inspiration to post (might be because I don’t have reliable desktop access rn).
If you want to crosspost content from reddit automatically use: https://github.com/daniel-lxs/BotIt,
It’s intended for links and I wouldn’t encourage using it for anything else cause you know, stealing content from others is not good.
But if you need a link aggregator for your community this might do it.Edit: this is a work in progress, so expect bugs.
