If you want your community to grow, there’s things you can do to help. Some of them are better than others. What are things that are good for the Fediverse, and what are some things that are better left on other platforms? Here’s a few things and my opinions
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Clickbaity titles (“Liberals DESTROYED by LOGIC”) - No thank you.
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Consistent posting - Yes. If you start a community, you’ll probably be the only one posting on there for a while. It’s easier to bootstrap a community if it’s something that comes with content ready-to-go somehow to make your job easier.
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GIFs - I’ve been using this over in !observances@midwest.social. That’s about as growth-hacky as I’d like to get, but I’m pretty sure people are more likely to engage with animated GIFs than static images for communities like that.
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Sources - I think this is something that can differentiate the Fediverse from other platforms. On my posts in !outofcontextcomics@lemmy.world, I’ve been spending time to source everything before posting it. This makes sure I don’t accidentally post edited images that I’ve seen over in /r/outofcontextcomics, and makes the Fediverse show up in searches. That actually probably hurts growth a little bit, but IMO is worth it
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Transcribing - Another differentiator for the Fediverse. Everything’s been done by hand and it’s been great. I’ve been transcribing my posts in !outofcontextcomics@lemmy.world and I’ve been very happy to see that search engines are already picking those up.
Yeah, to be clear, I just mention clickbait titles to say “no thank you”, and the Fediverse doesn’t need that.
I’m borrowing the term “growth hacking” from the VC “growth at all costs” community, but using it as more of a comparison. Growth is good, but uncontrolled growth is called cancer. How can we cultivate good, healthy growth, and what goes too far?
I think GIFs are kind of in a grey area. They can start to create the same stale meme feed as you mention, but if there’s some meat underneath that, that makes people stick around, then I think it’s worth it.
By posting consistently, I don’t mean spamming. It’s more “try to be active”. You can’t start a community by assuming “if you build it, they will come”. As an example, I started moderating !msp@midwest.social, and I’ve helped it out by posting interesting local news articles. I don’t just automatically repost everything though, that would be too spammy. I read the papers and specifically think about what articles would be interesting to post there.
Ah I got you, yes I totally agree. And I also do think gifs and shitposts etc can be shared and engaged with in an organic way that doesn’t force out slower content, which is also partly why active moderation is so important.