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.
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
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.
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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.
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
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
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 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.
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.
I’m trying to get into the habit of posting everyday, I fell out of it on reddit because it grew so big and would often go nowhere.
Mods rejecting posts willy-nilly, users who sit on /new thinking they can be the gatekeeper, shadowbanning of a post without being informed. It’s going to take some time to get used to posting more.
I make a content box and ration it out for good measure.
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
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.
I made [email protected] 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
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
community@lemmy.zip
on lemmy.zip, not throughlemmy.world/c/community .zip
).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.
ok, i’ll post every couple of days.
Awesome! and thank you for caring enough to do this.
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