Communities don't get cake days on Lemmy, but looking back at the posts in the Aussie Zone meta community, today 12/06 marks one year since @404@aussie.zone requested the community be created. Since then the top posts this community has had were:
I had a look sorting by controversial and I'm quite surprised that the referendum megathread, which bot recruit @dalekerrigan@aussie.zone kept reminding everyone about.
Within this first year we also participated in the first ever lemmyvision contest, with our nomination ranking 4th.
What were your favourite interactions and posts on this community over the year? And what would you like to see the community move towards in the years ahead?
I'd like to thank all the friendly, helpful people I've met, apologise for any steamy hot takes, and of course thank the mods for keeping us under control, and Lodion for standing up a place aussies can call home.
Honestly, I'd like to see more of the same, but with a growing user base. This place, and lemmy in general, deserves more eyes. Of course, that also brings risks and costs, but for discussion based communities, you need a 'critical mass'
I think your right about a need for critical mass.
Whether we should consider some kind of promotional campaign is probably a topic that should be discussed at some point. Be it of this instance specifically, or Lemmy in general, or even considering having sister aussie_zone instances and lean into smaller servers to create the whole.
Possibly recognisable from a certain media outlet ;)
Its probably better to focus on aussie_zone and any future sister servers rather than lemmy or fediverse as a whole.
Its a broad church out there. Last night i's reading about the Maven AI controversy. People here on Aussie_zone might be cool with promotion, (also might not be), but others on Lemmy might not be, its not practical to check with everyone on every Lemmy server, and it'd not be nice to garner a perception of speaking for them.
Sister instances would be my preferred option, it could mean we build the communities, but never have to sacrifice this instances culture by getting too large on a single instance.
Adding another view would be the way to go for sister instances to connect in a deeper way than the rest of the fediverse but still maintain some semblance of separateness.
It puts me in mind of the EU bloc, a supranational organisation, where the culture and way of life of the participating States is maintained, but many benefits of the closer connectedness are granted.
I'd be keen for a more descriptive view label than 'curated'. Maybe it could become an extra field that admins launching sister instances are able to fill in themselves. I guess this is something we'd have to approach lemmy developers about.
Giving them the ability to have a uniquely descriptive name could be fun though. In our case it could be Australasian Allied Instances (AAI), or Australasian Union of Federating Servers (AFUS), or my personal favourite "Warboss Gorgritch's Waargh on the Fediverse".