[META] Creating a new community is easy, but to get people on board, you need to create some content.
2y 11mon ago by lemmy.world/u/dystop in newcommunities
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.
I hard agree.
In fact, I'm finding that NOT focusing on these small interests, is largely more enjoyable of an experience.
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/animeis the most active non-meme anime community in Lemmyspace.
The meme group https://ani.social/c/animemesusually 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.
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.
lol, made a few groups when l.w was a ghost town. two days later the refugee flood began. several communities jumped by thousands overnight. wasn't expecting to be more than just me posting stuff I like. welcome welcome
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.
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 just opened a community yesterday! Honestly it’s hard to get people interested, while I love the subject of my community and could talk about it all day everyday I still feel weird being the only poster I appreciate everyone who has joined it! And every community needs lurkers but I feel like I’m having a conversation by myself lol I’m sure patience is half the battle so far I’ve decided that 2/3 post a day of thing I find esencial or specifically useful for my subscribers is a good way to start, but who knows I guess we will all figure it along the way.
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. 🤐
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.
The good thing about lemmy is that (at least for now) nothing falls into an empty void, someone will eventually see it :)
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/daniel-lxs/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
I joined the Glasgow community. I'm the only subscriber there!
Glasgow? My condolences.
Jk haha welcome to lemmy my dude
Promote it on UK server and to people from Glasgow
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
I think having 3-5 posts when you first open the community is fine, and then maybe 1 a day after that!
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
Sure!
If you guys look on my profile m/BotIt is a bot that will autopull content from subreddits you choose based on time and karma requirements you set.
GitHub is in the top post. Works great and will auto populate content.
Seems great
Does it schedule
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).
If you read about anything interesting, you can share the link (even on mobile)!
There's a reason I've been posting every Hermitcraft video to /c/Hermitcraft. It needs content or its just... Dead
I watched hermit craft 2 seasons many years ago
Great idea, I posted my own photography work here and people joined afterwards. https://lemmy.world/c/macrophotography
wow those photos look amazing!
Thanks!
so true : when i tried mastodon, the first feature i enjoyed was the local feed : it just give you the feeling you don't go to an empty place
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!
I understand the desire to automate this sort of thing and I can understand the utility at first but I think we should absolutely be afraid of that in long term use. Instead I think people should use the built in cross posting function to link conversations from different communities. I think this is a great way to build slow diffusion of communities into the fediverse.
See my post here for an example: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/217550
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
I’ve been doing just that. If you’re a fan of The Office, get on over to m/DunderMifflin. Although I’ve never been a fan of the name. It’d be better if it was m/PaperGreat. Where Great Paper is our Passion.
I actually can't access that - I've tried https://kbin.social/m/dundermifflinand https://lemmy.world/c/DunderMifflin@kbin.social. Do you have a link?
Believe it or not, it’s case-sensitive:
Is m/<community name> the notation for any fediverse community or for a specific platform like Lemmy or mastodon?
Oh gotcha. Thanks!
I started https://kbin.social/m/BostonTerrier and I'm trying to post multiple times a week, but it's difficult sort of throwing things into the void. Plus, I only have two dogs!
Is it meant to be a sub for serious discussion only? If not, you can google "cute Boston terrier" and find some interesting pictures to add to the mix!
It's just a breed appreciation sub, so not too serious. I did post a couple of Boston Terrier relevant articles and I'm going to continue to try to post a single post a day. The sub is six days old and currently has 5 posts (haven't posted today yet), but just me and one other sub, heh. Maybe it'll take off one day.
Same I throw things and people rarely help but it is still somewhat enjoyable. Different kind of enjoyable than reddit, not worse, meditative.
ok, i'll post every couple of days.
Awesome! and thank you for caring enough to do this.
I post 10 times a day because I just steal images
This thread is great for getting ideas on how to get some content in the community I have.
What might be a good idea is to spend a bit of time each week gathering content and then using https://github.com/RikudouSage/LemmyScheduleto spread out the posting throughout the week. Then you can comment on it as it shows up on your feed.
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
I understand the desire to automate this sort of thing and I can understand the utility at first but I think we should absolutely be afraid of that in long term use. Instead I think people should use the built in cross posting function to link conversations from different communities. I think this is a great way to build slow diffusion of communities into the fediverse.
See my post here for an example: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/217550
Yeah, automatic posts drive me away faster than anything. Good point on cross posting though, I just followed your advice. It's pretty much free if your post fits in multiple places and there are lots of nearly empty communities right now.
It is not clear how to cross-post, how do you actually do it? Is it just post the link to your post in another community?
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.
How do you create a community? I dont even have the option.
Press on the Hamburger menu > Create Community I think is the way.
For some reason the lemmy instance I chose disabled it so I have had to abandon lemmy.ml and go somewhere else. Stupid.
Thanks. I'll try to kickstart mine once I have some free time.
- If I created a community, would I become it's (lone) moderator automatically?
- What consequences, requirements and things would I need to keep in mind as a moderator?
- Is it advisable to copy-paste content from Reddit to kickstart new communities (given that the link source to the original content was added as well when making new posts)?
f I created a community, would I become it’s (lone) moderator automatically?
Yes. But you can also immediatly appoint new mods and/or un-mod yourself if there are other mods present, so it is easy to give a community away when there are other interested users. It's not a permanent thing.
What consequences, requirements and things would I need to keep in mind as a moderator?
Your community needs to be compatible wih the Fediverse Code of Conduct ... but that boils down to "don't be a dick and don't post illegal stuff" which is pretty much just common sense. It's not exactly hard to follow those rules ;)
Apart from that, you can set whatever rules you want. But keep in mind that the Fediverse is still a lot smaller than reddit, so if you are TOO niche / narrow / strict with the rules, you'll have a hard time finding people who want to engage with your community. General, broad-themed communities with easy-to-follow rules have a bigger chance to thrive.
... and a personal little tip: don't slam down the ban hammer at every opportunity. As a mod you are able to ban, silence, remove or otherwise "punish" people for bad behaviour, but that doesn't mean that you have to do that. It's a lot better to give users the benefit of the doubt, explain instead of punish (as they might not be aware that they did something bad in the first place), and give them a reasonable chance to fix their mistakes on their own before taking action. Post removal, bans and the like should be reserved solely for when the user in question is unwilling to cooperate OR did something obviously super shitty (like threatening other users, using slurs, posting illegal stuff etc.)
Is it advisable to copy-paste content from Reddit to kickstart new communities (given that the link source to the original content was added as well when making new posts)?
Well .... as a last resort, yes. Original content or stuff from non-reddit sources is always preferable as it gives users of the Fediverse an incentive to visit communities here instead of going to reddit, but copypasted content is still better than no content at all, so if you can't find interesting / worthwile stuff elsewhere, then copypasting from reddit is okay-ish too.
OC is still way better tho.
It's going to be a ghost town for a bit. You just have to accept it. Give someone enough content to want to search for the community and check out "top all time".
Crossposting is also a good way to start. For example there is community like lorraine@jlai.lu or lyon@jlai.lu 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.
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 fedigrow@lemmy.zip.
ask any reply guy.
That is true.
True that
I've created one so far (HarmlessPranks@kbin.social), and I've posted a thread, but I just don't have more stories of my own, nor stories of others that I remember well enough to retell. And I refuse to go back to reddit to copy other people's posts.
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
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 through lemmy.world/c/community@lemmy.zip).
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.
I'm talking about having to opt-in your instance FIRST as an admin before your users can enlist their magazines to that site
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
https://lemmy.zip/c/Palletsguys checkout my new community
I'm making communities so there is spaces for fellow like minded people to talk If it stays a ghost town for awhile so be it.