• 柊 つかさOPMEnglish
      3•1 month ago

      As is evident by you repeatedly referencing many communities in my posts, I’m not very good a noticing when my posts are fit for additional communities. I can’t help but notice that you put effort in making these comments, as opposed to cross-posting them yourself which would not be any more effort. Is there a reason for that? I don’t mind at all if you cross-post my posts elsewhere.

      • MentalEdgeEnglish
        1•1 month ago

        It’s partly an excuse to actually comment, which is a little more visible than the link of a crosspost, and as such it’s an opportunity to “drop a link” for anyone to maybe find their way to more communities.

        But it’s mainly a courtesy. I don’t want to “steal” every piece of content worth seeing for my own communities, and thereby make them the only ones worth subscribing to. Nor do I want to hog the updoot-dopamine. I want to let the people who find and post things be the ones that enjoy the positive feedback of sharing, as much as possible.

        And I want to encourage others to post more and to more communities. When it comes to anime art I’m already carrying way too hard. I want be one of the people sharing anime art on the threadiverse, not the one.

        • 柊 つかさOPMEnglish
          1•1 month ago

          I don’t think reposting on lemmy is any different than we already do. We repost already made content from other sites onto here. The original poster on some other site doesn’t get the upvotes from the post we make here either. The last point it a bit sad. I wanted to break the “lemmy isn’t active so I won’t actively use it” cycle by posting stuff on here. However after a year there seems to be only a handful of people actually posting consistently. This includes you and me. The communities haven’t really grown much in terms of active users. After reviewing my logs of monthly stats and looking at the numbers (subs vs rough avg. number of daily posts) of equivalent subreddits I think we don’t have the scale needed to achieve active niche communities where it is not just a single person posting 90% of the content. I might write a bigger analysis looking at the data in the future.

          • MentalEdgeEnglish
            1•1 month ago

            If the person from another site wanted to post it on Lemmy themselves, I would do the exact same thing. Encouraging and preferreing that they do so themselves.

            As for encouraging activity, I am absolutely succeeding. I measure success as simply whether there are people upvoting, and therefore enjoying, my posts. Why compare ourselves to Reddit?

            My first community was [email protected] which now has three other regular posters aside from myself and a growing sub-count of 1.5k.

            My moe communities are very niche but my bot for posting to them is only getting better, and over this last year several other posters have come and gone, some of which are still active (most notably the other poster on [email protected]).

            There’s also a handful of occasional posters like toes and graybackgroundmusic.

            I have even spotted the occasional artist posting to the moe communities, though as they actually do the incredible work of producing the art they post, they do so very seldom.

            My proudest success has been [email protected] which despite only just hitting 400 subs, has consistently stayed at 700 mau, suggesting there’s a ton of room to grow. Posts get A LOT of interactions considering it’s a manga/show specific sub, and the episode discussions had commenters EVERY week.

            Lots of us mods discuss how to effectively grow the threadiverse/fediverse over on [email protected], check it out!

            I think Lemmy>Microblog federation has been borked for a while. I tried to sub to some of my communities to get the federation over to that side of the fediverse, but the subs don’t go through, if that gets fixed, communities and posts could reach much more people.

            I also want to go see if I can maybe find some artists over on the microblog side, and let them know they can make their Mastodon/whatever posts show up in relevant communities on the threadiverse by mentioning them.

            • 柊 つかさOPMEnglish
              1•1 month 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!

              • MentalEdgeEnglish
                1•1 month 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.