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.
While I agree on every community needing at least a little content, I’m not sure I agree on the second point: if this place had a lot more communities, even with two active people each, it would also attract more users, or at least it would make me visit the site more and would have reduced the time I spent indecisive on signing up.
A community isn’t just a bunch of content but also a possibility for it. It’s the reassurance that there is at least another person on this site who shares your interest. It’s somerhing that makes it more attractive not to jump from site to site for each different interest. Those who create them are doing their part by being available as moderators, which is already something that should not be taken for granted.
I have plenty of ridiculously niche communities I’d like to see that would be lucky to get 3 members each, from lichens to cron diet (longevity diet with a little less calories than mantainance and very micronutrient dense) and scientific (or just fanboy like and excited sometimes, waterhomies style) discussion of nutraceuticals (such as garlic and ginger and turmeric) and of mitochondria and of microbiome, to specific anime/manga fans, to animal movements (crawling in various ways as a sport), and I could go on, but I don’t create them because I don’t want to mod them since my relationship with tech makes me go through unpredictable offline phases
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.
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.
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.
I think a “suggest a community” community could help prevent some dead communities before they happen. I made a separate post to discuss it: https://lemmy.world/post/27963154
There are already a couple of communities (almost) along those lines. Would be great if the mods here could add them to the sidebar here.
Now moved to [email protected].
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.
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 😄
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.
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
It’s for instance admins
No, it’s for everyone. Anyone can submit a community to lemmy-federate, and it will autosubscribe from a bunch of popular instances to trigger widespread federation.
