How are you doing with your communities?

!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.
- 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.

Promoted my !thrashmetal@lemmy.world community on !communitypromo@lemmy.ca for the first time. Gained ~10 subs.
- You're almost on par with with !metal@lemmy.world, that's impressive
  
  Thank you!
- I definitely read that as "trash metal" several times before getting it correct.
  
  Haha, yeah some people say trash metal instead, must be some misconception.

- 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).
  
  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.

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

Routine
!showsandmovies@lemm.ee still good
!movies@lemm.ee is still competing with !movies@lemmy.world, but I guess that will be the same for a while
!pokemon@lemm.ee gets some upvotes

I haven't been able to post as much this past week compared to normal, but things have been going ok:
!anime@ani.social is actually kind of booming right now with the start of a new season of shows. I have seen lots of first-time commenters chiming in on episode threads. It actually hit ~300 users/day at one point over the weekend.
!manga@ani.social has been calm but active. There are a handful of other fairly reliable posters that have been able to keep things going while I have been away.
The not as active ones:
!nokotan@ani.social - I inherited this community when the previous moderator had to step away for an extended period of time. The nokotan community in general is very meme-heavy, and I just don't really know how to engage with that very well. There is only so much non-meme content about the series. So, I am going to try to binge-read the manga and start posting chapter discussion threads when new chapters are released. I just need to find the time to do that.
!gundam@ani.social - This is another kind of special case. The current, most active Gundam community is !gundam@possumpat.io. However, that instance announced that they are shutting down later this month. The current users over there were interested in setting up a new community but there wasn't anybody that wanted to moderate. So, I offered my help in that respect. It just started this past week, so there isn't much there yet, but I am going to try to keep posting any Gundam-related content I find over there.
- I can try to help a bit with Gundam!
  
  Fantastic, thanks! I haven't made announcements yet about the new community, but hoping to do that some time this week when I get a chance.

Not great, no idea how to grow a continuity clearly. https://lemmy.world/c/cars
- !cars@lemmy.world
  Let me have a look
  
  I was wondering how to link like that, thank you!
- Have you tried promoting it on !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca ?
  You could also start weekly discussion threads just to get the ball rolling, people are usually more comfortable commenting than posting

Still posting daily on !dubstep@lemmy.dbzer0.com still getting barely any traction on anything and still have barely any engagement.
Still not too bothered either though. It's a very niche subject on a niche platform and I'm happy posting into a void, I know a few people stop by and that is enough for now :)
- EDM subs on lemmy are generally in a pretty poor state (progressive / trance / D&B). I occasionally contribute via another account, but it feels like there just isn't a critical mass yet.
  I will join !dubstep@lemmy.dbzer0.com and occasionally post too.
  
  Yeh this is true. I try to post occasionally on DnB as well but my wheel house is dubstep and so I mainly stick with that.
  I just carry on in the hopes that as more people join Lemmy that may be interested in it, hopefully they will find my community with a good, solid history of posts rather than just dead air. Hopefully as that happens more contributors will start popping up but until then I'll keep on keeping on :D
  A lot of the larger dubstep community still use shit like Facebook and Instagram so they obviously arent the kinds of people that prioritise things like privacy and decentralisation so I expect it will be a long wait xD
- You can maybe start a weekly thread "What have you listened to / discovered this week"?
  
  I have considered this but have yet to try it out yet, I should try at least, see if I get any responses :)

Trying to get !leagueoflegends@lemm.ee more active, small success so far
- I wanted to reach 100-150 users a week before creating a post to ask for volunteers to mod. I would rather not do it myself, too much on my plate already

!antisocialmedia@piefed.social has 72 subscribers and my posts are getting a decent amount of votes and a few comments. Not bad for a 5 day old community!
!sophie@piefed.social is pretty chill, just me posting pics of my dog I don't expect that to go anywhere. It's just for fun.

!lotrmemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com really starting to overthrow !lotrmemes@midwest.social. Pinging the last few posters on the midwest.social to the post helps.

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.

!news_summary@lemmy.dbzer0.com has been getting some decent engagement all posts get a couple of votes and some have bewn getting decent commenter engagement.

I've recently started three communities, right now they are basically just me posting journal entries, or things I organically find along the internet.
!metabolic_health@lemm.ee Is all science based journaling
!ketogenic@dubvee.org Is casual LCHF discussion
!carnivore@lemm.ee Is casual Carnivore discussion.
The last community got lots of negative attention, the name was unfortunate, but that is the name in the literature and it is triggering for some of the other lemmy users. ASF is used on occasion, but that is mostly in agriculture literature.
I've found it is useful to have a journal that you can link to, and discuss with people, so its a net positive use case, though it is very niche.
For the casual communities I look for content that can prime the social pump so people feel comfortable interacting (mostly youtube cooking videos for now)
- Not my topic of interest, but only happy to see more niche communities pop up.
  Good luck!

Been trying to get some life into !boardgames@sopuli.xyz, but it's been slow growing the subscriber count. I'm really happy to see !longreads@sh.itjust.works has picked up its own momentum and is getting content beyond just my posts.
- I really liked the idea of LongReads but never subbed because most of the posts were depressing long reads.
  Checked now and I'm happy to see that alongside peoples' insurance getting cut off, something about Trump, and something about abortion, there's articles about knots and Guitar Hero.
- I really enjoy the board games community!
- Thank you for board games, it's nice!

Finally made the backup community for !otomegames@ani.social over at !otomegames@lemmy.zip.
- Well done!

Not my communities, but I'm getting tired of the constant federation issues with lemdro.id communities...
- Didn't notice it was a thing
  @cole@lemdro.id @ladfrombrad@lemdro.id @ijeff@lemdro.id are you guys aware of this?
  
  It's probably harder to notice with c/android because it has a lot of subscribers, so when your post finally appears on other instances after 10 hours, you might still get some interactions, but in other communities your post is pretty much doomed to be dead at that point.