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.
I hard agree.
In fact, I’m finding that NOT focusing on these small interests, is largely more enjoyable of an experience.
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.
(plug) Speaking of general anime communities, https://ani.social/c/anime is the most active non-meme anime community in Lemmyspace.
The meme group https://ani.social/c/animemes usually has slightly more activity, according to Lemmyverse.
There are plenty of TV show/manga-specific communities around as well, and you can find them in the ani.social/c/anime sidebar.
Crossposting is also a good way to start. For example there is community like [email protected] or [email protected] 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.
Also to everyone creating a community, it takes time. Don’t get too discouraged if uptake is slow!
Its not about how popular it is, its about having a space to talk to fellow like minded people.
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.
I joined the Glasgow community. I’m the only subscriber there!
Glasgow? My condolences.
Jk haha welcome to lemmy my dude
Promote it on UK server and to people from Glasgow
- 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.
Would you mind if I pin this post? I feel like it will be helpful if people can see this post the second they enter this community, to help with the 0-1 post problem
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.
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
There’s a reason I’ve been posting every Hermitcraft video to /c/Hermitcraft. It needs content or its just… Dead
and once you get a few regular posters, ask if they’d mind helping with modding. I’m guilty of skipping the asking part now and then. going on a road trip etc.
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 😄
Worth mentioning that if you have put in the work to have lots of posts, it might still show as very few, maybe 0–1 posts to people if they are viewing the community from another instance. Posts from other instances do not federate over to yours unless someone on your instance subscribed to it. And if all the users subscribing on your instance unsubscribe, then you will not get any more posts from it federating over until someone subscribes again. So a community that follows this advice can appear as if they did not put in the work when they really did. To get around this problem, view the community from the instance it is hosted on (e.g. view
[email protected]on lemmy.zip, not throughlemmy.world/c/[email protected]).It will all be effective ONLY IF your content is being pulled in by other instances. Otherwise people in other instances dont know your community exists. It will still be screaming into the void
It’s for instance admins, so I can’t unless I make my own instance
Even then you have to create the same comminity you made from another instance, and you have to tell them where you moved the community to
Thanks. I’ll try to kickstart mine once I have some free time.
I’ve been doing just that. If you’re a fan of The Office, get on over to m/DunderMifflin. Although I’ve never been a fan of the name. It’d be better if it was m/PaperGreat. Where Great Paper is our Passion.
Is m/<community name> the notation for any fediverse community or for a specific platform like Lemmy or mastodon?
m/<community name> = kbin.social magazine
Oh gotcha. Thanks!
