I wish people would write some descriptions for their communities

WhoRoger@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 532 points –

I often browse /all, come across a post that looks interesting but I have no clue what's it about, so I check the sidebar - and all I find is "An unofficial Lemmy community for X", " A place to discuss everything about X", or the best kind, "A continuation of r/X from Reddit".

Can't people write just some basics? What is that thing, a TV show, a music band, a sports team, a tabletop game? Sometimes I really can't tell even after looking at a few posts.

Your community may be of interest to someone who stumbles upon it, not only to diehard fans.

I know sometimes that's the joke, but most times it would be simple to just use a few words. "Discuss X, a Zimbabwean spy-thriller public theatre show." There we go, now everyone knows what it is.

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Agreed! I started a community a couple days ago and I also browsed through the descriptions of other communities to get an idea of what we should put in one (I have no experience moderating subreddits or anything like that) and I found that many had little to nothing in the sidebar.

In case this is of any use to you or others, here's what I've found to work well:

  1. Summary of what the community is about
  2. Community rules of conduct
  3. Links to related communities that offer similar content
  4. Some additional info/useful links that are related to the topic.

Good formatting also makes it look clean and professional.

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!skeptic@lemmy.world
!debunkthis@lemmy.world

Did you have to do anything special to start one? I just tried and I keep getting an error: {"error":"rate_limit_error"} when I hit create.

It was actually easy to create it (I’m on lemm.ee instance) the hard part is I think just being able to maintain engagement.