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.
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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.
I hard agree.
In fact, I’m finding that NOT focusing on these small interests, is largely more enjoyable of an experience.
What is hard too, is if all the posts to get things started are the mods or creator, the same ghost town might occur. It’s hard to tell or know what will be interesting to get people talking so to speak. Some should also be put on the subscribers as well who also have an interest. It’s a double edge sword sometimes.
Yes, but if you don’t know what people would find interesting, neither would the first few subscribers. It’s better to have at least some stuff there (even if it’s all posted by you).
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.
Also to everyone creating a community, it takes time. Don’t get too discouraged if uptake is slow!
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.
Its not about how popular it is, its about having a space to talk to fellow like minded people.
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.
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.
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. 🤐
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
If you want to crosspost content from reddit automatically use: https://github.com/driccio98/BotIt,
It’s intended for links and I wouldn’t encourage using it for anything else cause you know, stealing content from others is not good.
But if you need a link aggregator for your community this might do it.Edit: this is a work in progress, so expect bugs.
Is there a way to ensure it only posts links and not OC?
in theory, you can exclude anything that is a text post, but a lot of the content posted on sum subs that you want are self posts. like sports post games, weekly resets in games, or transcripts of twitter threads.
Yup, I made it so it would only post links. In my opinion is not a good idea to let the bot take every post it finds.
Also it currently only posts 1 post at a time on each fetch so as to not flood the magazine and let users post by themselves.Does it let you use it on specific users? Some bots would be useful to put it on. I know of a few that post relevant videos automatically or aggregate game API data that would be good to add to a few subs.
Fanny_B already set up a game bot for the baseball communities. If you run any other sports maybe check to see if he could help you out!
This one just fetches posts from subreddits, something like that would probably need API access, and as we know, reddit will start charging for it.
It might be a good idea to just port those bots (when doable) and make them post on Lemmy/kbin as well
It does it automatically!, it won’t post anything that isn’t a link
I’m liking this! I think I’ll get it added to a community I mod. Thank you!
No problem! let me know if you have any questions or find any bugs
It does it automatically!, it won’t post anything that isn’t a link
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.
I kind of hate that you’re right
Doesn’t matter how you do it - if you can figure out how to automate it, good!
Great idea, I posted my own photography work here and people joined afterwards. https://lemmy.world/c/macrophotography
wow those photos look amazing!
Thanks!
I make an effort to comment on interesting posts or links I appreciate! But I haven’t had much in terms of inspiration to post (might be because I don’t have reliable desktop access rn).
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 made !vans@lemmy.world 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
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.
