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Creating a new community is easy, but to get people on board, you need to create some content.

If you create a community, please try and populate it with content. I see a lot of new communities with 0-1 posts from the mod. That's not nearly enough to get people engaged - users are going to see that it's a ghost town and leave.

If you have enough interest to create a community, you probably know something about the subject matter, so PLEASE add some posts (5-10 would be a good start). Maybe some questions to get people talking, even popular reposts from other sites. It sucks shouting into a void, but if you don't do it, everyone else will also be shouting into a void.

Also please consider whether you need to create a community! When there are 100 million users of the site, there may be 1000 people who are interested in the same exact niche tabletop RPG as you, but there are <500,000 users here for now, so you'll be lucky to find 10. Consider creating a thread in a broader community (like boardgames) until you have enough people talking in the thread that it gets messy - then it's time to create a separate community.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

63 comments

  • I wish more people understood this concept in general. Whether it be making communities on a network like this, making discord servers, or even starting a small business -- many times my friends and acquaintances have tried to create something that relies on people to keep it alive, but give no one a reason to want to engage with their platform/service/etc, expecting there to be a flood of people out of nowhere that will cause the system to support itself.

    Good talk, needs more exposure.

    • Thanks! All i can do is try to mention it where I can, and hopefully more people will see this.

  • What is hard too, is if all the posts to get things started are the mods or creator, the same ghost town might occur. It’s hard to tell or know what will be interesting to get people talking so to speak. Some should also be put on the subscribers as well who also have an interest. It’s a double edge sword sometimes.

    • Yes, but if you don't know what people would find interesting, neither would the first few subscribers. It's better to have at least some stuff there (even if it's all posted by you).

  • I only have so many interesting things to say. I don't really want to post for the sake of generating content, so making 5-10 posts right off the bat seems like the wrong way to go about it. I think it'd be better to make one post a day or one every other day or so that anyone who comes in can see that it's recently active.

    • Yeah, you're right, I'm going to try posting something at a daily cadence to build up content in the communities I made, and hopefully more people will join in.

      The only way Lemmy can maintain its momentum is by generating original content.

    • But then why create a community then?

      You can always at least post YT videos or links to articles so that people can see there's activity on the comm and it's not dead.

    • I am trained in nonstop content generation for steemit.com and Hive.io where being a spammer was the key to success. I would post 100 comments a day and 1 post a day because that was the maximum amount of posts per day. Now on Lemmy it seems my spammy instinct came out and I comment and post dozens of times a day on multiple accounts. 🤐

  • I'm trying to get into the habit of posting everyday, I fell out of it on reddit because it grew so big and would often go nowhere.

    Mods rejecting posts willy-nilly, users who sit on /new thinking they can be the gatekeeper, shadowbanning of a post without being informed. It's going to take some time to get used to posting more.

  • Would you mind if I pin this post? I feel like it will be helpful if people can see this post the second they enter this community, to help with the 0-1 post problem

  • I make an effort to comment on interesting posts or links I appreciate! But I haven't had much in terms of inspiration to post (might be because I don't have reliable desktop access rn).

  • made several for my own interests. a few are just me. a few have thousands of subs. who knew?

    • You used the "cats" cheat code 😄

      • had a few cat pics I wanted to post. 2 days later thousands of ex-reddit subs. up,up,down,down,left,right,left... recruited more mods. never was a redditor

    • If I created a community, would I become it's (lone) moderator automatically?
    • What consequences, requirements and things would I need to keep in mind as a moderator?
    • Is it advisable to copy-paste content from Reddit to kickstart new communities (given that the link source to the original content was added as well when making new posts)?

    • f I created a community, would I become it’s (lone) moderator automatically?

      Yes. But you can also immediatly appoint new mods and/or un-mod yourself if there are other mods present, so it is easy to give a community away when there are other interested users. It's not a permanent thing.

      What consequences, requirements and things would I need to keep in mind as a moderator?

      Your community needs to be compatible wih the Fediverse Code of Conduct ... but that boils down to "don't be a dick and don't post illegal stuff" which is pretty much just common sense. It's not exactly hard to follow those rules ;)

      Apart from that, you can set whatever rules you want. But keep in mind that the Fediverse is still a lot smaller than reddit, so if you are TOO niche / narrow / strict with the rules, you'll have a hard time finding people who want to engage with your community. General, broad-themed communities with easy-to-follow rules have a bigger chance to thrive.

      ... and a personal little tip: don't slam down the ban hammer at every opportunity. As a mod you are able to ban, silence, remove or otherwise "punish" people for bad behaviour, but that doesn't mean that you have to do that. It's a lot better to give users the benefit of the doubt, explain instead of punish (as they might not be aware that they did something bad in the first place), and give them a reasonable chance to fix their mistakes on their own before taking action. Post removal, bans and the like should be reserved solely for when the user in question is unwilling to cooperate OR did something obviously super shitty (like threatening other users, using slurs, posting illegal stuff etc.)

      Is it advisable to copy-paste content from Reddit to kickstart new communities (given that the link source to the original content was added as well when making new posts)?

      Well .... as a last resort, yes. Original content or stuff from non-reddit sources is always preferable as it gives users of the Fediverse an incentive to visit communities here instead of going to reddit, but copypasted content is still better than no content at all, so if you can't find interesting / worthwile stuff elsewhere, then copypasting from reddit is okay-ish too.

      OC is still way better tho.

  • Tip for those creating new communities: don't slam your fresh community with loads of new posts all at once. Pace yourselves. Create 2 or 3 new posts initially. Then over the next day pop a new post every few hours.

    The net result is the same (content!), but you greatly reduce the risk of people blocking your community. I look a lot in local, sorting by new. And when my feed is deluged by posts for the same brand new community, I tend to block that community because it's smells like spam. And I'm probably not alone in doing this.

  • If you guys look on my profile m/BotIt is a bot that will autopull content from subreddits you choose based on time and karma requirements you set.

    GitHub is in the top post. Works great and will auto populate content.

  • Crossposting is also a good way to start. For example there is community like !lorraine@jlai.lu or !lyon@jlai.lu that focus on specific part of France. They have almost no original content but someone interested on Lyon's local story may not be subscribe to all the community about tourist, politic, urbanism, activism, fun stories and so on that publish stories about this place.

  • Thanks. I'll try to kickstart mine once I have some free time.

63 comments