If you want your community to grow, there’s things you can do to help. Some of them are better than others. What are things that are good for the Fediverse, and what are some things that are better left on other platforms? Here’s a few things and my opinions
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Clickbaity titles (“Liberals DESTROYED by LOGIC”) - No thank you.
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Consistent posting - Yes. If you start a community, you’ll probably be the only one posting on there for a while. It’s easier to bootstrap a community if it’s something that comes with content ready-to-go somehow to make your job easier.
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GIFs - I’ve been using this over in !observances@midwest.social. That’s about as growth-hacky as I’d like to get, but I’m pretty sure people are more likely to engage with animated GIFs than static images for communities like that.
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Sources - I think this is something that can differentiate the Fediverse from other platforms. On my posts in !outofcontextcomics@lemmy.world, I’ve been spending time to source everything before posting it. This makes sure I don’t accidentally post edited images that I’ve seen over in /r/outofcontextcomics, and makes the Fediverse show up in searches. That actually probably hurts growth a little bit, but IMO is worth it
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Transcribing - Another differentiator for the Fediverse. Everything’s been done by hand and it’s been great. I’ve been transcribing my posts in !outofcontextcomics@lemmy.world and I’ve been very happy to see that search engines are already picking those up.
Transcribing as a growth hack is cool because it’s also more accessibility for disabled people. Probably even more helpful if you put your transcription of images as alt text.
I’ve always seen sourcing more as a preemptive “someone’s going to ask where I got it from” or a personal ethics thing you might do if you value it, not growth hacking.
Clickbait is a push-away factor for me. I’m not here for outrage.
I think most users here would agree with you (I certainly do). There are dozens of apps out there that scroll the same memes endlessly and trying to make Lemmy competitive in the marketplace for attention by imitating that format will fail. I think the best strategy for Lemmy-growers is to lean into the strengths of the Fediverse by hosting discussions and communities that the Reddit algorithm suppresses.