• BrikoX
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    169 months ago

    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.net instance. 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.

  • UKFilmNerd
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    149 months ago

    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…⬇️👇⬇️👇⬇️

    • @Blaze@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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      59 months ago

      I chose my current instance because they disable downvotes for this reason. At least it’s one less vector of negativity

      • @chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz
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        -19 months ago

        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.

        • @Blaze@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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          49 months ago

          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)

          • @chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz
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            29 months ago

            As much as it did and does bother me, it’s probably not worth the effort. That community probably isn’t worth my time.

  • Otter
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    9 months ago

    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

    • @Blaze@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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      49 months ago

      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

    • @Microw@lemm.ee
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      49 months ago

      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.

      • @Blaze@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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        29 months ago

        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?

    • threelonmusketeersM
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      29 months ago

      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?

  • @shortwavesurfer@monero.town
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    89 months ago

    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.

  • @sbv@sh.itjust.works
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    89 months ago

    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.

    • @misk@sopuli.xyz
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      89 months ago

      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.

    • @Blaze@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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      39 months ago

      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

      • @sbv@sh.itjust.works
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        29 months ago

        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.

  • threelonmusketeersM
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    89 months ago

    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.

    • @Blaze@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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      49 months ago

      Hello,

      Good to see you here! On the same as you for everything, especially trying to run positive communities

    • @ElectroVagrant
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      39 months ago

      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

      !pocketknife@lemmy.world

      !wallpapers@lemmy.ca

      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.

  • @ThisIsNotHim@sopuli.xyz
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    79 months ago

    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.

  • @darakan@lemm.ee
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    49 months ago

    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.

  • @can@sh.itjust.works
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    49 months ago

    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.

  • @p5yk0t1km1r4ge
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    49 months ago

    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.

  • @mojo_raisin
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    39 months ago

    Ah, I really enjoyed interestingasfuck at the other place, I posted one just now, I’d like to see that community succeed.

  • insomniac_lemon
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    38 months ago

    I posted some stuff and ran into this plus my threads not getting federated to certain places. And 3 weeks later they are still the newest posts on those communities (Kbin’s ps1graphics and blender communities, note that Kbin communities seem to not use the community link format).

    I had some technical questions and a roadblock too, but they are niche so I just… didn’t deal with it. Maybe there’s an instance out there that’d fit (for me, someone who dabbles in art and programming while not really being those things), but also I doubt it particularly because I’m only interested in a semi-niche programming language. Audience vs niche seems like an unwinnable balance.

    I’ve thought about posting to a more popular lemmy.world community for the next thing I make as it would probably get more of a response, but probably not answers so that wouldn’t matter since the stuff I made so far was just random objects. Well, I guess getting answers for Blender questions is more likely.

    • @Blaze@reddthat.com
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      28 months ago

      Hello,

      Welcome here! Did you try !blender@lemmy.world? Seems reasonable active, and with a 2.5k userbase.

      But yes indeed, it’s sometimes difficult to find the audience for a niche topic, general topics do better on average

      • insomniac_lemon
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        18 months ago

        I haven’t, the other community I was thinking of is !artshare which has 3.94K subs.

        My style is low-poly with vertex colors (no textures). My Blender questions weren’t really that important, the roadblock I am having is trying to use said models in a specific framework (or maybe the very specific bindings I’m using) just not loading vertex colors (I am not sure if there is ‘help’ here, aside from just fix it).

  • @cactusupyourbutt
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    29 months ago

    op, from someone who browses /c/all, I frequently see your posts, so thanks, keep on keeping on