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

dystop@lemmy.world to New Communities@lemmy.world – 130 points –

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.

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I wonder if years of fleeing the front page to niche subs conditioned us all to try and make niche subs here when we should just be shooting the breeze right here on front street.

It feels so alien to actually put a run on sentence idea out and not parrot a meme.

That said I made some shit posts on one of the nichest of niche communities.

Agree with this sentiment. The night's young here, so I think a little consolidation would do more to help us at this point in time

I hard agree.

In fact, I'm finding that NOT focusing on these small interests, is largely more enjoyable of an experience.

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.

Another thought: making a community can also be a nice structured incentive to check in on your hobby regularly. I like looking for videos or articles to link to for my yugioh community even though there's not many people subscribed - it gives me an opportunity to interact with and think about the game in different ways than I normally do.

Yes. That's why good literature and good philosophy community. It helps think and read. Also music community for what I listen to. Collaborative playlist hopefully. 🎶👌

Also to everyone creating a community, it takes time. Don't get too discouraged if uptake is slow!

Yes, this can't be stressed enough. Expect to be shouting into a void for 2-3 days. That's the price of being an early adopter!

Might be weeks even, this sort of thing really can't be predicted at the very early stages.

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 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).

I’ve been doing just that. If you’re a fan of The Office, get on over to m/DunderMifflin. Although I’ve never been a fan of the name. It’d be better if it was m/PaperGreat. Where Great Paper is our Passion.

There's a reason I've been posting every Hermitcraft video to /c/Hermitcraft. It needs content or its just... Dead

How do you create a community? I dont even have the option.

Press on the Hamburger menu > Create Community I think is the way.

For some reason the lemmy instance I chose disabled it so I have had to abandon lemmy.ml and go somewhere else. Stupid.

I made !vans@lemmy.world and I've been thinking about posting once a day so that I don't exhaust my content to post, but is that enough? Should I try to make a couple posts a day?

r/vans is in the top 5% of subreddit size. I've got one subscriber other than myself! Haha

If you want to crosspost content from reddit automatically use: https://github.com/daniel-lxs/BotIt,
It's intended for links and I wouldn't encourage using it for anything else cause you know, stealing content from others is not good.
But if you need a link aggregator for your community this might do it.

Edit: this is a work in progress, so expect bugs.

Is there a way to ensure it only posts links and not OC?

in theory, you can exclude anything that is a text post, but a lot of the content posted on sum subs that you want are self posts. like sports post games, weekly resets in games, or transcripts of twitter threads.

Yup, I made it so it would only post links. In my opinion is not a good idea to let the bot take every post it finds.
Also it currently only posts 1 post at a time on each fetch so as to not flood the magazine and let users post by themselves.

Does it let you use it on specific users? Some bots would be useful to put it on. I know of a few that post relevant videos automatically or aggregate game API data that would be good to add to a few subs.

Fanny_B already set up a game bot for the baseball communities. If you run any other sports maybe check to see if he could help you out!

An idea for people like me that still use reddit alongside lemmy, if you make a post on lemmy, post the lemmy link to the corresponding subreddit. That way if the post gets traction on reddit, all the clicks are leading them to the lemmy post

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'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.

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.

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 joined the Glasgow community. I'm the only subscriber there!

Promote it on UK server and to people from Glasgow

Glasgow? My condolences.

Jk haha welcome to lemmy my dude

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