I’m not gonna lie, sometimes it feels a bit lonely. I try to post on a few generic communities
- !interestingasfuck@lemm.ee
- !casualconversation@lemmy.world
- !movies@lemm.ee
- !lego@lemmy.world
- !map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz
- !comicbooks@lemmy.world
- !avatar@lemmy.world
Sometimes I can be the only poster for a few weeks. Makes me requestion the relevance of posting at all. I started posting to !pics@lemmy.world recently just because at least my posts are widely seen, and other people post there as well.
I don’t like “big” instances, since they tend to quickly walk back on their promised goals once they no longer can manage their size. So when I joined Lemmy it was on a smaller now defunct
vlemmy.netinstance. The idea of operating and moderating the community was not that appealing, but it was a way to promote the instance, so I started !globalnews@vlemmy.net and !databreaches@vlemmy.net. It was a slow start, but they grew over time, reaching 1000/400 subscribers respectively and then the admin killed the instance and vanished. That was a lesson.After that, I joined
lemmy.zip, it was tiny then, but it had a lot of things going for it, multiple admins, multiple communication channels, transparent finances and good base rules. What it lacked was content. So I had to decide if it was worth my time to start over by creating another community and help it grow. I re-started !globalnews@lemmy.zip and !databreaches@lemmy.zip and just started posting without any expectations. It was an outlet to share what I found interesting or what caught my eye. Eventually, people started commenting, and organic discussions started happening. I expanded the number of communities I moderate now, but the principles are the same. No expectations.So the reason for all this backstory is that I stay motived by believing in the project and wanting to help good instances to grow. If not for Lemmy I wouldn’t be posting anywhere else, never moderated on Reddit, never even posted on Reddit, was a habitual lurker there.
Just find topics you are interested in, maybe set up an RSS client and share the content that you find interesting yourself.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I see your posts every day, impressive
It’s never bothered me - I talk to myself a lot anyway.
It’s a little disconcerting when I post stuff and people (I assume) down vote it because they can’t be bothered to read past the headline.
I posted a video to an almost dead Tron community with Joseph Kosinski talking about Tron Legacy being released in 4K.
But, again, I assume, because the video thumbnail and description was all about Top Gun Maverick…⬇️👇⬇️👇⬇️
I chose my current instance because they disable downvotes for this reason. At least it’s one less vector of negativity
You say that, but I recently had a comment deleted and got banned from a community on that instance. I wasn’t being a jerk or anything. The mod was power tripping.
Sorry to hear, there are power tripping mods everywhere.
You can always try to escalate to the admins (even though sometimes they don’t want to interfere with communities)
As much as it did and does bother me, it’s probably not worth the effort. That community probably isn’t worth my time.
I’m kind of giving up. When I came over during the Reddit APIpocolypse, I tried to post as much as I could. My posts here don’t get much engagement, and only seem to reach a small audience, so it doesn’t feel like it’s worth the effort.
I still try to post and comment, but it feels like a slog sometimes.
Completely get what you feel. I had a look at your last posts, at least the good a few comments, that’s something.
Sometimes it’s even worse, you post then all you get back is negativity. I just posted on !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world, there are some comments which I just reported
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I had a look at your last posts, at least the good a few comments, that’s something.
Yeah. When I post about politics, I often get some responses. They tend to be pretty same-y, but it’s better than nothing.
I’m sorry you’re getting unnecessarily hostile comments on your posts. That’s disheartening.
Don’t ever think it’s up to you or any individual to carry the success of Lemmy or individual communities. Post what you think is worth sharing and don’t force yourself if you don’t feel like it. If Lemmy is to be more popular it will be on the backs of many people collectively.
I haven’t been posting / commenting as much recently because I’ve been busy with life stuff, but I do like seeing the posts (ex. I enjoy seeing the Lego posts). It would be nice to have more comments, but otherwise I usually upvote or save the post
One thing I’ve noticed is that even on Reddit, there are more posts with lots of upvotes and no comments. I’m not sure why that is
I’m planning to get posting again, but what I’ve found is that a lot of posts in the niche communities didn’t go anywhere. Then every now and then a post takes off and a lot of people see it.
Best is when other people start posting too (ex. !publichealth@mander.xyz ). I guess it takes time for an active contributor with similar interests to find the community, since others might not encounter enough content outside of Lemmy to post them
Best is when other people start posting too (ex. !publichealth@mander.xyz ). I guess it takes time for an active contributor with similar interests to find the community, since others might not encounter enough content outside of Lemmy to post them
Definitely. I’m kind of waiting to find another poster on most of my communities, feels almost like searching for a soulmate ha ha
I’m kind of waiting to find another poster on most of my communities, feels almost like searching for a soulmate ha ha
Yeah, even one other poster is definitely motivating. Shout-out to @llamacoffee@lemmy.world for their posts in !spacex@sh.itjust.works and !spaceflight@sh.itjust.works!
Bro! The feeling is mutual!
Just trying to keep adding interesting content to the community, in the hopes that other reddit migrators find a place full of good stuff and discover what a breath of fresh air we have here.
Welcome here!
!leagueoflegends@lemmy.world please! I know you people are out there.
Just contribute anything. Early participation is important.
Ah, it’s you, welcome here! I haven’t followed the LoL scene since a while, but I’ll try to contribute
MSI starts on Wednesday morning.
I see! I just posted, it’s not much but it’s a start
A lot of people simply are lurkers. I know so many people irl who browse sites like reddit, 9gag, news sites or whatever all the time, and never in their life would consider to post comments.
Oh, definitely. The 90 lurkers - 9 commenters - 1 poster ratio seems to apply on Lemmy too. It might even be less, because it would mean that out of 50k people, there would be 500 posters?
even on Reddit, there are more posts with lots of upvotes and no comments. I’m not sure why that is
Could these be from repost bots?
Most probably
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Hello,
Good to see you here! On the same as you for everything, especially trying to run positive communities
I think alongside trying to foster more upbeat/constructive communities, it may also help to have a mixture of novel/different posts and if relevant, helpful posts.
For example, a few communities I’ve noticed are…
!amateursatellites@lemmy.world
The first is definitely niche, second is maybe somewhere between, and the last benefits from being widely appealing, but what they each have in common is that there’s something different to come across from their posts. First is satellite imagery, second courtesy of a couple posters is some weirder pocket knives, and the last is more or less like pics but with a bonus of being a variety of images you could use on your phone or PC.
A tricky part with each of these so far has been that despite some upvotes, you may not see posts from them too often depending on your sort setting as they don’t often draw too many comments to each post.
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My biggest issue here as well. Can’t find new communities and then when I do join I never see them in my algo.
I never see them in my algo
That’s odd. Even when browsing by subscribed and sorting by new or scaled?
Scaled subscribed feed works for me to show most of the niche communities I sub to
I’m probably sorted wrong. I either do top 6 hours or hot.
Top 6 should show them. Are you sure the communities federate correctly with your instance? Have a look at them on their home instance, then from your instance, and see if posts are missing.
If yes, copy the link of the missing post, and paste it into the search bar. It should then appear and “unblock” the federation
That’s interesting, I knew none of those before your posts. We definitely need a place to better advertise communities. I know !communitypromo@lemmy.ca and !newcommunities@lemmy.world exist, but they are probably underused at the moment
I tend to agree. I think both of those communities are good for communities starting out or just opening up after adjusting some settings mishaps (e.g. whoops set to NSFW, mods only, or language settings), but they don’t really fit for trying to get additional attention after that.
I made a small attempt over in General Discussion with this post encouraging people to share active communities, but nobody’s added to it with their own lists of active communities or mentioning a single or couple communities they’ve been enjoying. 🤷♀️
Oh, that’s a nice post (I missed it too) Would you like to crosspost to !casualconversation@lemm.ee ?
I take it this is okay? 😅
Definitely, thanks!
Wow, I had no idea this existed. @thomasdouwes@sopuli.xyz, you could definitely do more to promote this one. You should post in !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca.
You also might consider the occasional crosspost to !spaceflight@sh.itjust.works, as I imagine there is some overlap in user interest. Would you like me to add a link to your sub in the sidebar?
I shout into it more and hope that one day the void will answer back. It works occasionally. For example, I moderate a T-Mobile US community and started it off at zero and it’s got over 200 subscribers now. Most posts still don’t get comments, but there are some that do, and sometimes conversation even occurs or is beginning to anyway.
I do this for a few sublemmys like !nasa@lemmy.world and !esa@feddit.nl. I view it as keeping communities on “life support” until Lemmy grows a bit more.
One of the best practices I can think of is to cross-post a post with text in the body (important) from a small sublemmy to a large sublemmy. This creates a link to the original post on the smaller community, and gives it some visibility.
Text in the body should be required.
Do you think it would make more sense to have just one umbrella “space” community, on maybe mander.xyz (which already has !astronomy@mander.xyz ), or even !space@lemmy.world ?
Part of the problem may be lack of tagging and filtering tools.
For example:
I’m not interested in memes so if a community is largely filled with them, my only way to avoid them may be to block the community. This includes communities that I might otherwise subscribe to, or want to engage with.
This is also tied into community fragmentation, community discoverability, and feeling the need to browse All to see anything. I don’t know how widespread my issue is, but I have seen others mentioning having extensive block lists of communities.
Which community did you post to where you where the only one posting?
I’m responding more to the feeling that a community has a single human posting. Even as a reader it can feel that way.
Sometimes I question the fact that some communities might be too niche, but even on something as generic as !movies@lemm.ee there aren’t that many people wanting to talk about movies
I feel like Lemmites generally have a handful of interests: US politics, Linux, and Star Trek. I guess the war in Gaza gets a lot of comments too. But outside of that range, it gets pretty quiet.
Going back to Reddit every now and then, it’s nice to see conversations on other topics.
Yes, it’s kind of strange. I have been trying to correct that with recents posts in !pics@lemmy.world and !interestingasfuck@lemm.ee.
We are 50k people here, don’t tell me there is no one that likes other stuff that the one you listed.
I think some of this may be the default Active sort setting for the all/federated feed keeping some communities and their posts around the top. Might be mistaken, but my understanding is that it primarily elevates upvoted posts with recent comments, leaning on recent comments for keeping it visible.
Problem is, that means some posts that may get a decent amount of upvotes but no or few comments may gradually get buried, only rising to the top briefly or on some slower days.
I think as a result of getting buried, some may not see the other stuff they might want to talk about to comment on, and besides that, I sometimes get the sense there are a lot of lurkers around here, voting on stuff but otherwise not commenting either for lack of anything to add or not wanting to risk getting into arguments (if not both).
voting on stuff but otherwise not commenting either for lack of anything to add
I see myself in this comment and I don’t like it. It’s hard to make the first comment though. Any suggestions?
What you did at the end can be a good approach tbh. Be curious and ask something about the post, or something in it that you’re not sure of or familiar with, or if the OP hasn’t added any body text or indications in the title and simply posted, what their opinion on it is, or if it’s like a show/story/site/product, what’s the premise or what’s up with it and what they like about it.
Also if you don’t want to focus it on the OP, in the absence of other comments, you can say as much like, “Do you (including anyone else reading) know/think [somethingsomething here]?”
Hello, good to see you here.
You might be right, this is indeed a filtering issue. I use “New comments” on Subscribed, and then “Top X hours” on All, but people who use Active must definitely be missing on some.
I think part of the issue is there’s multiple communities on different instances for the same topic. I’m subscribed to like 4 different movie communities. If we all just stuck to one, maybe there would be better engagement?
That’s interesting, because I can exactly tell you why there are so many movies communities
- !movies@lemmy.world got created but is pretty much unmanaged. People on LW just post there out of habit, or because they support LW
- there was historically a moviesandtv on an instance called lemmy.film. It was getting some traction, but then the instance disappeared
- to keep another instance out of LW, people (including me) got involved into !moviesandtv@lemm.ee. It was going well, but at some point I suggested to have discussion threads for current movies, and to engage more with the community. The mod found that “backseat moderating” and banned me. The details can be found in the spoilers in the OP here: https://lemmy.world/post/11446250?scrollToComments=true
- I thus took over !movies@lemm.ee, to kind of have that space to discuss movies.
I think we might consider posting to !movies@lemmy.world to promote the two others on Lemm.ee. I actually did that 2 months ago to talk about the Dune discussion thread we had on !movies@lemm.ee: https://lemmy.world/post/12820343?scrollToComments=true
18 upvotes, no comments, and that’s it. I guess a few people went there, but I’m not sure.
Well, that’s ridiculous! I imagine there are similar stories for other communities as well which ends up with a bunch of fragmentation.
I agree with you.
I even escalated the “power tripping” of the mod of !moviesandtv@lemm.ee at the time to the admin instance, but their stance was that they didn’t want to interfere with the moderation of communities, as that would be themselves powertripping.
I’m going to post to the LW community to advertise !movies@lemm.ee at least
I imagine there are similar stories for other communities as well which ends up with a bunch of fragmentation.
We narrowly avoided fragmentation with !lemmyapps@lemmy.world and !lemmyapps@sh.itjust.works. Some amount of consolidation is definitely a good thing especially since Lemmy’s userbase is still small.
That was another shitshow, probably the worst I’ve ever seen on Lemmy
Dang, this sucks. I usually post news rather than open discussions so I never noticed. I had my own disagreements with lemm.ee admin back in the day which is why I’m on sopuli.xyz among some other things.
I do wonder if going with movies community on an instance that has more broad one already is too much of a handicap. Something like beehaws’s c/entertainment could work if parked at some instance that’s federated well enough.
Open discussions are always the hardest things to get comments and actual conversations in the comments, except maybe in the AskLemmy community where it works well.
I do wonder if going with movies community on an instance that has more broad one already is too much of a handicap
It might be, I just posted on !movies@lemmy.world (not wanting to get another account banned on !moviesandtv@lemm.ee ), we’ll see how it goes
I don’t think that’s much of an issue to be honest, and even if it is, having a “large” audience able to see it from their local feed should outweigh the con.
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Definitely, and in this case we can use the fact that the !movies@lemmy.world isn’t actually managed that much
Isn’t this because there’s already moviesandtv which seems to be better suited to the current community size?
moviesandtv exist, but don’t really allow people to discuss movies and shows, it’s mostly about news.
I suggested at the time to just have a pinned post like “what have you been watching”, but got banned by the mod for “backseat moderation” (see below: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/8381687)
The other issue is that as Lemmy posts don’t have unique URLs that can be used by every instance, you can’t just have a megathread with links to discussion threads, as that would work only for one instance
The other issue is that as Lemmy posts don’t have unique URLs that can be used by every instance, you can’t just have a megathread with links to discussion threads, as that would work only for one instance
I’m curious as to how Lemmy apps solve this issue (which they seem to have done), and why the web interface doesn’t have similar functionality. In Eternity and Thunder, I can tap on a link to a post on another instance, and it opens the corresponding post on my home instance.
Is there some lookup table under the hood to match post IDs between instances? Whatever system apps are using, why would this not work more broadly?
Interesting, I never noticed, guess I’ll have to reinstall Thunder.
On browser, there is lemmyverse.link, but
- if the site goes down, all your links are now dead
- having to select the instance people want to see the link would probably be annoying to most users
I am not sure how apps can do it better than the web UI, but I had a quick look on the Github and that issue is still open: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2987
For now, Lemmy Universal Link Switcher is a great browser script which mostly simulates the functionality of instance agnostic post and comment links. It would be great if the equivalent functionality could be integrated natively into Lemmy though.
Indeed!
I started moderating !animation@lemm.ee about two weeks ago. I don’t feel demotivated so far because it’s still early days and I think it’s a fairly niche topic. Especially among Lemmy’s somewhat older userbase. On top of that the subscriber count has more than tripled during that time so I’m pretty happy with that. The one thing that frustrates me are the occasional random downvotes. I’m certain most of them are just by people not subscribed. I kind of wish there was a way to set it up so only subscribers to the community could downvote.
The 1 post that got a huge amount of traction and a lot of fun conversation (even though some of it was off topic) was a discussion question in the form of a meme. I wanted to try it out because on the ALL feed, the majority of the most popular posts are memes. It’s not something I want to do too often because I don’t want that to be the focus, but I’ll probably do it from time to time in the hopes of getting more people engaged. And maybe pull some more subscribers.
Hello,
Welcome here, thank you for your comment, happy to see that your community is doing well. I’ll add a link to the sidebar of !movies@lemm.ee
Oh awesome. That’s very nice of you. I’ve done the same.
Thanks! I’ll probably do a small post about it later this week (Sunday tends to bit a bit slower on Lemmy)
I don’t mind the slower nature of lemmy. I like how quiet it is compared to the karma farming spam bot hell reddit was.
This.
I don’t mind. We’re still early adopters here really. I see it as slowly building a stronger place for people to find in future exoduses.
Ah, I really enjoyed interestingasfuck at the other place, I posted one just now, I’d like to see that community succeed.
Thanks! Hopefully it will!
On Facebook, before I stopped, I tried writing well sourced political pieces and no amount of engagement was enough - when there was none it was… Annoying maybe, or disheartening. It made me think about why I was doing it.
I stopped posting on Facebook and I’m slowly moving to my own site and the fediverse.
So I’d say reflect on why you’re doing it and hopefully align your actions or expectations with that introspection.
Curious, what is your site? Did you post it somewhere on the Fediverse? In which community?
I haven’t yet; moving from a Jekyll based blog to a different stack at the moment. Been doing a lot of digital migrations like to proton and such this past month.
I’ll post it when there’s enough on there to be proud of or worth showing. Thanks for the curiosity.
What’s important is we never stop trying to connect, we keep pushing for meaningful dialogues and educating ourselves and our neighbors.
