• 柊 つかさOPM
    link
    English
    12 months ago

    What I meant with activity was people posting. My initial goal was to kickstart communities by posting but having those communities be self sustaining in the end. I compare to reddit simply because I wanted communities for topics I like on the fediverse just like they had on reddit. Those communities are robust in this sense: take away a few random people from the set of people that posts. The community would survive easily, enough people would continue to interact. Now compare that to my communities. If I get hit by a bus, they are dead immediately. I have this Ghibli community with more than 1000 subs. When I was of lemmy for a month, the monthly users dropped to zero (same with all other communities)! I care not only for decentralisation in a technical sense but also in a social sense. My communities are not socially decentralised: there is a single point of failure which is me (I only stopped posting not moderating, although there was nothing to moderate lo). To get robust self sustaining communities for, let’s say, individual slice of life anime from yesteryear you need a certain amount of contributing users. Contributing users are x% of the subscribed/interested. The subscribed/interested are y% of the platform user base. Therefore the platform user base needs to achieve a certain critical mass. For example, lemmy did achieve this critical mass for more general topics like linux. But the more niche the topic, the harder it is to hit this threshold. It’s good to hear that you have been achieving your goals. I just don’t think I can say that for myself at all. Lately I have been working on this cringe anime database with some kind of semantic search (it has a type system 🤣). Given how hard it is to get a Lucky Star community going I doubt anyone will be adding Lucky Star database entries soon!

    • MentalEdge
      link
      fedilink
      English
      12 months ago

      I’d really appreciate it if you used paragraphs. Would make reading longer comments like that one a little nicer.

      Like you say, redundant activity is extremely difficult, and the second and third posters only show up when a community already seems active. It’s a catch 22.

      On Lemmy, as it is new, we are still in a phase where people like you and me who are out to post things, are more likely to create new communities instead of finding existing ones where the things they want to post would fit in.

      That’s kinda why I shifted gears and made actively looking out for posts that might fit in in more places part of the my deal. To get that redundancy and overlap going, so that even if I disappear, others might still be around posting similar stuff, and so that the people posting to their own communities, might start posting to each others communities, too.

      For the same reason, I want to see if I can get Mastodon users involved with the threadiverse. There are lots of artists over there, and they are already used to hashtags to make relevant things visible to people looking for it, so I don’t think it’s a stretch that if only the active users over there knew more about the threadiverse, there could be more interaction.

      Hopefully Mastodon’s support for groups will eventually bring even better interoperability.