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  • !superbowl@lemmy.world has been getting some people posting things of their own lately and it's been really nice to see!

    A couple people have submitted pics they've taken of owls they've encountered, and there's been some art and articles. Good variety of things.

    I like it because I don't mind posting all the things as the content is pretty easy to get, but it's all coming from my taste and perspective on what is interesting, so it's good to see what I'm missing or overlooking, plus I like seeing people's real life experiences with nature.

    I'd been feeling uninspired, and this has given me a big boost as it feels I've finally inspired some others to contribute. I'm happy to teach and answer questions, but seeing others take an active role in the growth of the community is truly something else. I want it to be a space for everyone to be happy and enjoy each other being there together looking at beautiful nature things.

    Also I've been having decent luck incorporating more non-English speaking content. Got nice photos and stories from Kuwait, China, Slovenia, France, Germany and others rolling in now. It increases variety and perspective, and I like learning about the language and culture aspects from other users and from just reading and learning the terms to find the content. A German user also provided some links to German animal rescues for the sidebar links.

    Comments feel a bit slower, but with all the other good, I'm not going to sweat that right now. Activity is still there overall.

    • Always nice to see superbowl on my homepage, thank you for creating it! :D

      • Glad to hear that! I didn't start it, others beat me over here, but it was becoming inactive, and I didn't want to see that, so I am keeping it active until it can become self-sustaining.

        Gave your Latin community a look. Only suggestion I'd make is if you're short on content, just post one thing a day until you pick up some more members so you don't use up all your material. I use an app that I can save drafts in, and I've built up a couple weeks reserve content in case I hit a dry spell. Now I can easily make 4 posts a day, but I worked my way up from 1 as I built up my stream of sources. Keep it active, but don't burn yourself out mentally or on ideas.

        Other than that, building a community is really slow here, but it is worth it as there are some really good commenters here once you can land a few. You've got 200 subs in half a week, which sounds like a great start. Much like anything else, res = labori. Stick with it, maintain your happiness posting to it, and people will come to see you and hopefully share back. If you're having fun, that will attract people.

  • The pikas will return. My mental health just hit the floor, and I've been struggling. Hope things are better for y'all.

  • Things could be better, i guess. on !latin@lemm.ee, after 3-4 days i managed to build a community of 76 followers! i'd say that's pretty good. But...

    I'm the only one posting there, and whenever i try to encourage actual discussion instead of just posting memes/interesting facts about Latin, nobody is attracted to it. A little bummed, but it's still early days.

    And i feel like i'm running out of content to hold their attention, and frankly it's a little stressing. I don't want the community to die before it even starts. It doesn't help the vacation just ended, and i'm more busy now.

    I was actually going to post here asking for tips, but this thread was just created, so this is a good place to ask, i guess.

    • Starting a new community is an uphill slog. Some tips and observations:

      • Make sure to subscribe to the community from several of the large instances so that it is federated there and people viewing the all feed can see it.
      • If you haven't yet, make sure to announce the community in !newcommunities@lemmy.world and/or !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
      • If you can think of some kind of recurring post series, it is a good structure to provide a steady drip of content. For latin, maybe something like a weekly post about the etymology of a modern word with a latin root?
      • In general, posts with a lead image generate much more interaction than non-image, discussion posts. So, the meme-type posts can serve a role to help people discover the community.

      • Make sure to subscribe to the community from several of the large instances so that it is federated there and people viewing the all feed can see it.

        I never even thought about this, but it is an important and easy to overlook step in how federation works! Great tip for noobs trying to start communities and to more experienced users who aren't as attentive to how the fediverse actually works (guilty).

      • I thought of #1, but it sounds weird to use my alts to subscribe to my own community 😅 I'll try to check if any large instances don't have any subscribers; if so, i'll make an alt an just subscribe.

        I've promoted it on both, gotten me from ~35 -> 65, i'd say that's great!

        And yeah, i like posting etymology, and i've done it; but it feels a little dirty posting other people's work, even if i credit them. I'll try to credit them harder, though; putting the name of the creator directly in the title, and making a post mentioning them. I think that's fair enough

        And for the last point, i learned that the hard way. hours i've watched as my futile attempt at a discussion sit at 0 comments, yet my memes get 20-50 upvotes 😂

      • Posting in !newcommunities@lemmy.world is almost mandatory. I saw a 100x activity on my comms once I posted there

    • Yeah it was like that for me for a while. You just have to try your best not to run out of ideas, really know your stuff and just persist, even when it feels like you aren't getting anywhere. And then every now and then, you will manage to engage a great contributor, who decides to post regularly, taking some of the load off yourself. If you continue to persist anyway, eventually more will come, creating enough of a community to engage in light discussion. I am sorta at that point with !thrashmetal@lemmy.world. I have a couple other great regular posters, one of which posts daily, which helps me to reach an even bigger audience (effectively having double the content). Now I have plenty of content, I just need to keep at it, and keep the place alive and with time it should hopefully grow naturally.

      • Wow, you've been posting for 2 years, I've only been doing so for 3 days 😅 and somehow, I've already gotten 76 subscribers (excluding my alts for federation) it seems the bottleneck is myself; I'll devise a schedule of posts for myself, and hopefully that'll encourage people to post.

        I'm more into hard metal myself, but your community seems great! Good luck with it!

  • All of them are working as intended, can't ask for much more than that. I don't think it's healthy to get caught up in subscribers and all that too much. Things are generally trending positively, good enough for me.

    There's been a disappointing uptick in negative interactions on the fediverse lately (IMO) and that's more disturbing to me than community numbers. Some (again, IMO) questionable decisions are being made in some of the larger places on the fediverse but a lot of it is users taking it as a challenge or a right of passage to get banned from communities or instances so they can meme and rant about it. It's silly behavior and we can do better than this.

    • It’s silly behavior and we can do better than this.

      It should be limited to groups banning each other and ignoring each other (after all, that's the point of the Fediverse, to be able to ignore whoever you want and create your own space), but LW latest announcement just brought all the drama to the next level.

      They still have to do another one, not sure if I'm looking forward to it or afraid they mess up again.

      • The problem is that toxicity leeches out across the fediverse which stifles growth as more and more negativity makes it to front pages around the web. I don't have the solution either but I do think more accountability is needed for users and moderators across the fediverse.

75 comments