There's absolute mass quantities, as Beldar the Conehead might say.
It's easy enough to guess that plenty of people just grabbed a community name in case they might find it useful one day, but I'm guessing plenty of others legitimately started up a community, put some effort in to it, then ultimately got discouraged and abandoned it. A big part of that likely due to not being able to attract many subscribers and contributors.
Personally what I've found is that if you really want a community to grow, you need to seed it with content on a regular basis; preferably daily. Posting bots are probably a good way to help with that, altho if the sub looks like it's little more than bot posts, I don't think users will be inclined to post or comment much.
What I haven't quite figured out myself is how to incline users to post on their own, but hopefully with time that issue will kind of resolve itself due to sheer user count.
I'm one of those guys who abandonned the communities i created. In one of them i posted 1 or 2 posts every day for 4 months after i realized that i was the sole poster i decided to stop
I'm usually the only poster in the one I created, but I'm happy knowing a few people read it.
Hmm, it looks like you're mod of ~three fairly dormant communities that have very small user bases. Unfortunately, at that size I wouldn't think there'd be much in the way of regular comments, much less guest posts.
In my case I was lucky, because a co-mod and regular poster happened to join in early-on, and we were able to build up the first couple hundred users fairly quickly.
But something else that I think helped a lot was that our community is very visual-oriented, so it was pretty easy to find users who were perfectly happy to join up just to look at pretty images without necessarily clicking links or putting too much thought in to anything deeper. So pandering to the lowest common denominator of user interest seems to work nicely for building up base numbers. That said, there's still a lot of growth we need to do, which likely involves outreach of some kind or another.
I mod 4, but only the smallest one (worldwithoutus) is actually mine.
It has about 240 people now, so according to the 90:9:1 rule (out of every 100 people 1 posts and 9 interact) there should be 2 people posting but in reality it's not at that point yet! However, I like doing it.
The other 3 are bigger but not any more active.
very small user bases
If you're talking about the stats, you're probably only able to see how many accounts from your own instance are subscribers.
Kbin is kind of weird because the software is way less developed than Lemmy and it has regular outages, so a lot of people signed up and then left, a lot of communities got abandoned due to inactive mods and spam problems. So something like the kbin worldnews community I mod has literally thousands of inactive subscribers.
Oh shoot, I meant the above for @small44@lemmy.world actually, i.e. OP. I don't believe you had replied to me at any point, hence that wasn't meant for you.
That said-- I'm not too sure the "90:9:1" rule applies so well to the FV. For one thing, it seems like a good number of subscribers tried out Lemmy (etc) at some point and then went back to Reddit (etc), meaning they're no longer really here. Another point is that since the FV moves a lot more slowly than Reddit, I question whether FV users are as active here compared to other places.
About the bias of me seeing only part of Small44's community numbers due to filtering by my own instance-- you're right of course, but after double-checking their overall global numbers, they're actually only a tiny bit larger. Ironically or not, most of their users came from my own instance (lemm.ee). So their numbers across three communities are really too small to ever be properly viable IME.
So something like the kbin worldnews community I mod has literally thousands of inactive subscribers.
Ah, that makes more sense if it was meant for small44. The only reason I thought your numbers were out was because I thought you were talking to me about my communities.
Geez, that’s… not good
It's not ideal, and kbin did fork. In my opinion it was not the dev's fault, it wasn't even really a beta when he suddenly got swamped with reddit refugees. But I believe in his vision.
There's absolute mass quantities, as Beldar the Conehead might say.
It's easy enough to guess that plenty of people just grabbed a community name in case they might find it useful one day, but I'm guessing plenty of others legitimately started up a community, put some effort in to it, then ultimately got discouraged and abandoned it. A big part of that likely due to not being able to attract many subscribers and contributors.
Personally what I've found is that if you really want a community to grow, you need to seed it with content on a regular basis; preferably daily. Posting bots are probably a good way to help with that, altho if the sub looks like it's little more than bot posts, I don't think users will be inclined to post or comment much.
What I haven't quite figured out myself is how to incline users to post on their own, but hopefully with time that issue will kind of resolve itself due to sheer user count.
Btw, see here:
https://lemm.ee/c/fedigrow
I'm one of those guys who abandonned the communities i created. In one of them i posted 1 or 2 posts every day for 4 months after i realized that i was the sole poster i decided to stop
I'm usually the only poster in the one I created, but I'm happy knowing a few people read it.
Hmm, it looks like you're mod of ~three fairly dormant communities that have very small user bases. Unfortunately, at that size I wouldn't think there'd be much in the way of regular comments, much less guest posts.
In my case I was lucky, because a co-mod and regular poster happened to join in early-on, and we were able to build up the first couple hundred users fairly quickly.
But something else that I think helped a lot was that our community is very visual-oriented, so it was pretty easy to find users who were perfectly happy to join up just to look at pretty images without necessarily clicking links or putting too much thought in to anything deeper. So pandering to the lowest common denominator of user interest seems to work nicely for building up base numbers. That said, there's still a lot of growth we need to do, which likely involves outreach of some kind or another.
I mod 4, but only the smallest one (worldwithoutus) is actually mine.
It has about 240 people now, so according to the 90:9:1 rule (out of every 100 people 1 posts and 9 interact) there should be 2 people posting but in reality it's not at that point yet! However, I like doing it.
The other 3 are bigger but not any more active.
If you're talking about the stats, you're probably only able to see how many accounts from your own instance are subscribers.
Kbin is kind of weird because the software is way less developed than Lemmy and it has regular outages, so a lot of people signed up and then left, a lot of communities got abandoned due to inactive mods and spam problems. So something like the kbin worldnews community I mod has literally thousands of inactive subscribers.
Oh shoot, I meant the above for @small44@lemmy.world actually, i.e. OP. I don't believe you had replied to me at any point, hence that wasn't meant for you.
That said-- I'm not too sure the "90:9:1" rule applies so well to the FV. For one thing, it seems like a good number of subscribers tried out Lemmy (etc) at some point and then went back to Reddit (etc), meaning they're no longer really here. Another point is that since the FV moves a lot more slowly than Reddit, I question whether FV users are as active here compared to other places.
About the bias of me seeing only part of Small44's community numbers due to filtering by my own instance-- you're right of course, but after double-checking their overall global numbers, they're actually only a tiny bit larger. Ironically or not, most of their users came from my own instance (lemm.ee). So their numbers across three communities are really too small to ever be properly viable IME.
Geez, that's... not good. :S
https://lemm.ee/u/small44@lemmy.world
Ah, that makes more sense if it was meant for small44. The only reason I thought your numbers were out was because I thought you were talking to me about my communities.
It's not ideal, and kbin did fork. In my opinion it was not the dev's fault, it wasn't even really a beta when he suddenly got swamped with reddit refugees. But I believe in his vision.