They will. My experience community building thus far is that if you can build up one anchor community to the point where people are organically sharing content and commenting, other adjacent communities will start to generate the same sorts of things with smaller subscriber bases because that anchor community is keeping people's eyes here. Just a question of time.
Yes, when you make a post look at the line where the 'save post' button is at the bottom of the entry. There will be two overlapping squares. That's the crosspost button.
I'm usually a lurker, but I decided to just go ahead and make one that I was missing. Something about personally wanting Lemmy to grow is motivating to me.
I made an XCOM community on Lemmy.world, and even though I'm the only one posting so far, it's fun to watch the subscriber count grow. Already at 50!
Please definitely don't be discouraged in the slightest, TPM.
Single-game forums were almost always the smallest gaming subreddits on Reddit, often times being several orders of magnitude smaller than the "gaming in general" communities.
But that special feeling of having other people passionate about that specific game you love can't be beat. Hang in there, and you'll definitely grow and get that engagement in time.
May I suggest doing an informal poll of some sort to boost engagement? I'm not that familiar with XCOM, but it's a pretty big series with a lot of games, right? Maybe just a simple "which is your favorite XCOM game?" thread.
I’m dying with the lack of baseball communication. The biggest Baseball and Atlanta Braves communities are pretty much dead and I really miss talking ball.
Sports is definitely hard to have take off in these sorts of spaces, since sports are generally talked about much more amongst regular/casual users, than the more tech-savvy crowd who are willing to try these things out.
It's the same on the biggest ActivityPub platform (Mastodon) - the really popular regular subjects such as sports and cars just don't have a presence there.
The best thing you can do to help is to comment on threads. I know it feels weird to comment in an empty post, but it does tend to spur lurkers to respond.
Phillies fan checking in. Agree.
I have a community with a bot that posts game updates like Reddit (which is nice) but the game threads are mainly me posting once or twice and one or two other people with side off comments. No community engagement so to speak. Long way from the Reddit game threads of several thousand comments.
Feel your pain. I'm constantly thinking, what the hell do I have to do to get r/orioles to follow me over to Lemmy to grow the numbers? They are one of the only things left at Reddit that I regularly look at. But 99% of the mod and user base there just doesn't care about the the issue.
Conversely, that means that at least sports spaces are among the least bot-spammed places on Reddit. So there's that.
I was lamenting the lack of an NFL community here but no way in hell I'm joining a Dallas Cowboys community regardless of how much discussion it generates. 😆
Shameless plug for !baseball@fanaticus.social (check out our sidebar for the team-specific communities). We've got the game bots ported over and are working on improving them and adding new features.
I agree with !matt@lemmy.world though, the Venn diagram of sports fans and tech-savvy lemmy pioneers is pretty small. You can help by posting and commenting to attract more users. More content == more users (eventually).
You need both though. Memes and shitposts to scroll though and chuckle, and then quality stuff to engage on. Lemmys got that, and the momentum will keep it growing.
I tried lemmy like a year or so ago, and it felt so stale. The technology is there, but the content just wasn’t. That’s clearly changed now. 😊
Would be nice if there was a way for posts to be flagged such that memes and shitposts and more serious discussions could be separated, so you could filter depending on mood.
Yep, also an easier way to explore/sign up and filter instances and their different pages. I'm new and have no idea what I'm doing regarding that. So far I'm just signing up to instances and hoping new interesting stuff appears on my page.. I'm on Lemmy.world as I assume we all are, how do I view the different pages on this instance or is it all just in a singular feed?
Hit the communities button near the top of the page to subscribe and view. You don't need to sign up to more instances unless you really want to, we can post on any federated instance. It's weird at first but you'll get it.
Discoverability is something that could definitely use more work. Right now I recommend the site lemmyverse.net/communities, which is searchable and shows subscriber and active user counts. It should help you find where the most populated communities for your interests are located, if they already exist over here.
Your front page has three feeds. All is just what you'd expect. Local filters to only show posts from your home instance (lemmy.world in your case). I find it's mostly useful if you're registered to a smaller instance and want to keep up with local concerns.
Home shows updates for all communities you are subscribed to.
I'm on sh.itjust.works, others might be on lemm.ee, lemmy.zip, feddit.uk, etc., but we can all interact with each other. That's one of the benefits of the fediverse.
Totally agree! I just have been a registered reader on Reddit. Now, it’s the first time I’m participating - might be considerably because lemmy is trending. Nevertheless, I found communities and post I’m interested in within minutes - 👌🏼 whereas Reddit was mostly clutter.
I'd also expect another big jump when clients like Sync and Boost get their apps for Lemmy online. That will attract an enormous amount of users from reddit.
It just definitely needed to hit a critical mass. Enough that people had enough to read, stick around, and post themselves. Which in turn created a place that new people felt had enough content.
It's also about search engine indexing. It's happening slowly, but I've noticed Lemmy posts are finally beginning to show up in Google/Bing search results. As this trend improves, more people will stumble here by accident and then join out of curiosity.
I thought I was gonna be able to quit Reddit full time. Didn’t look for a few days, then did. Still check since some niche communities aren’t over here (or active) yet so I have to go there. But I only still check every few days (I was a several time a day redditor so usage is down) and I’ll check Lemmy at least once or twice a day now.