• anon6789@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    2 months ago

    !superbowl@lemmy.world has been getting some people posting things of their own lately and it’s been really nice to see!

    A couple people have submitted pics they’ve taken of owls they’ve encountered, and there’s been some art and articles. Good variety of things.

    I like it because I don’t mind posting all the things as the content is pretty easy to get, but it’s all coming from my taste and perspective on what is interesting, so it’s good to see what I’m missing or overlooking, plus I like seeing people’s real life experiences with nature.

    I’d been feeling uninspired, and this has given me a big boost as it feels I’ve finally inspired some others to contribute. I’m happy to teach and answer questions, but seeing others take an active role in the growth of the community is truly something else. I want it to be a space for everyone to be happy and enjoy each other being there together looking at beautiful nature things.

    Also I’ve been having decent luck incorporating more non-English speaking content. Got nice photos and stories from Kuwait, China, Slovenia, France, Germany and others rolling in now. It increases variety and perspective, and I like learning about the language and culture aspects from other users and from just reading and learning the terms to find the content. A German user also provided some links to German animal rescues for the sidebar links.

    Comments feel a bit slower, but with all the other good, I’m not going to sweat that right now. Activity is still there overall.

      • anon6789@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        2 months ago

        Glad to hear that! I didn’t start it, others beat me over here, but it was becoming inactive, and I didn’t want to see that, so I am keeping it active until it can become self-sustaining.

        Gave your Latin community a look. Only suggestion I’d make is if you’re short on content, just post one thing a day until you pick up some more members so you don’t use up all your material. I use an app that I can save drafts in, and I’ve built up a couple weeks reserve content in case I hit a dry spell. Now I can easily make 4 posts a day, but I worked my way up from 1 as I built up my stream of sources. Keep it active, but don’t burn yourself out mentally or on ideas.

        Other than that, building a community is really slow here, but it is worth it as there are some really good commenters here once you can land a few. You’ve got 200 subs in half a week, which sounds like a great start. Much like anything else, res = labori. Stick with it, maintain your happiness posting to it, and people will come to see you and hopefully share back. If you’re having fun, that will attract people.

          • anon6789@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            2 months ago

            I never intended to be a poster, I’m normally moderately social at best, but the community was more important to me than maintaining my comfort zone was. When I was posting 1 or 2, I’d more actively go out into other communities to comment to try to get them active as well, but now I kinda get stuck enjoying the goings on at Superb Owl and I can sometimes forget about the other people trying to build their stuff. I don’t know how people like Blaze with all these communities manage it all! The mega posters I assume just have a lot of time and like attention, but the actual work part of building the Fed is something else I feel.

            • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
              4·
              2 months ago

              Blaze with all these communities manage it all

              I usually just repost good content from Reddit. That’s the trick, there’s no magic behind it 😅

              • anon6789@lemmy.worldEnglish
                4·
                2 months ago

                Lol it’s still work. As much of my stuff is largely reposts with some repacking and expansion, I know.

                You maintain a ton of dialog with people too. You’ve definitely got something going on that isn’t part of the majority of people here, and we’re all grateful for that!

              • anon6789@lemmy.worldEnglish
                4·
                2 months ago

                I think you’re still an early adopter. Instances are still growing, there’s still new communities every day, and I still think we’re forming our identity as a media platform. We’re getting pretty far from Lemmy’s founding focused on communism, and becoming something diverse and unique. A lot of the copies of well established groups may be taken already, but they’re not all so big a better version couldn’t overtake them, and with federation it doesn’t need to totally replace it, they can compliment each other. It’s a different model of doing things and we’re still learning to play to its strengths and weaknesses.

                People are hearing about Bluesky in the news now, but I’ve yet to encounter and real life folk who have heard of Lemmy. That still makes it the uncharted waters of the internet to me!

    • wjs018@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      2 months ago

      Starting a new community is an uphill slog. Some tips and observations:

      • Make sure to subscribe to the community from several of the large instances so that it is federated there and people viewing the all feed can see it.
      • If you haven’t yet, make sure to announce the community in !newcommunities@lemmy.world and/or !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
      • If you can think of some kind of recurring post series, it is a good structure to provide a steady drip of content. For latin, maybe something like a weekly post about the etymology of a modern word with a latin root?
      • In general, posts with a lead image generate much more interaction than non-image, discussion posts. So, the meme-type posts can serve a role to help people discover the community.
      • anon6789@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        2 months ago

        Make sure to subscribe to the community from several of the large instances so that it is federated there and people viewing the all feed can see it.

        I never even thought about this, but it is an important and easy to overlook step in how federation works! Great tip for noobs trying to start communities and to more experienced users who aren’t as attentive to how the fediverse actually works (guilty).

    • serpineslair@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      Yeah it was like that for me for a while. You just have to try your best not to run out of ideas, really know your stuff and just persist, even when it feels like you aren’t getting anywhere. And then every now and then, you will manage to engage a great contributor, who decides to post regularly, taking some of the load off yourself. If you continue to persist anyway, eventually more will come, creating enough of a community to engage in light discussion. I am sorta at that point with !thrashmetal@lemmy.world. I have a couple other great regular posters, one of which posts daily, which helps me to reach an even bigger audience (effectively having double the content). Now I have plenty of content, I just need to keep at it, and keep the place alive and with time it should hopefully grow naturally.

  • DaMonsterKnees@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    2 months ago

    The pikas will return. My mental health just hit the floor, and I’ve been struggling. Hope things are better for y’all.

  • FrostyTrichs@walledgarden.xyzEnglish
    6·
    2 months ago

    All of them are working as intended, can’t ask for much more than that. I don’t think it’s healthy to get caught up in subscribers and all that too much. Things are generally trending positively, good enough for me.

    There’s been a disappointing uptick in negative interactions on the fediverse lately (IMO) and that’s more disturbing to me than community numbers. Some (again, IMO) questionable decisions are being made in some of the larger places on the fediverse but a lot of it is users taking it as a challenge or a right of passage to get banned from communities or instances so they can meme and rant about it. It’s silly behavior and we can do better than this.

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      It’s silly behavior and we can do better than this.

      It should be limited to groups banning each other and ignoring each other (after all, that’s the point of the Fediverse, to be able to ignore whoever you want and create your own space), but LW latest announcement just brought all the drama to the next level.

      They still have to do another one, not sure if I’m looking forward to it or afraid they mess up again.

      • FrostyTrichs@walledgarden.xyzEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        The problem is that toxicity leeches out across the fediverse which stifles growth as more and more negativity makes it to front pages around the web. I don’t have the solution either but I do think more accountability is needed for users and moderators across the fediverse.

        • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
          4·
          2 months ago

          Due to human nature, drama is “juicy”, people like to witness it, and may even pick teams in a conflict. That’s unfortunate indeed, but not sure what we can do about it.

          • FrostyTrichs@walledgarden.xyzEnglish
            2·
            2 months ago

            not sure what we can do about it.

            Discourage it instead of fanning the flames. Take a stance against bad faith actors and trolls, the same shit we’ve always done.

            I think out of desperation to grow and thrive a lot of things are being let go and ignored. As always, this will only lead to things deteriorating until the place is detestable like Facebook, Twitter, etc.

            Instead of embracing the things we can do better than those platforms we’ve carved out a space on many of the major instances for the worst of these people, and that’s a mistake IMO.

            • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
              3·
              2 months ago

              Take a stance against bad faith actors and trolls, the same shit we’ve always done.

              Who’s the bad faith actor between vegans and carnivores?

              • FrostyTrichs@walledgarden.xyzEnglish
                21·
                2 months ago

                Don’t know, I don’t engage with that nonsense.

                Editing to add:

                Let’s not pretend there aren’t shitheads on every side of every argument. If people are behaving in ways that aren’t what the home instances want, they should be dealt with by their instance admins and moderation. Doesn’t matter if you eat meat, plants, or paint chips. We don’t have to be like this, it’s a choice.

  • wjs018@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    2 months ago

    I haven’t been able to post as much this past week compared to normal, but things have been going ok:

    • !anime@ani.social is actually kind of booming right now with the start of a new season of shows. I have seen lots of first-time commenters chiming in on episode threads. It actually hit ~300 users/day at one point over the weekend.
    • !manga@ani.social has been calm but active. There are a handful of other fairly reliable posters that have been able to keep things going while I have been away.

    The not as active ones:

    • !nokotan@ani.social - I inherited this community when the previous moderator had to step away for an extended period of time. The nokotan community in general is very meme-heavy, and I just don’t really know how to engage with that very well. There is only so much non-meme content about the series. So, I am going to try to binge-read the manga and start posting chapter discussion threads when new chapters are released. I just need to find the time to do that.
    • !gundam@ani.social - This is another kind of special case. The current, most active Gundam community is !gundam@possumpat.io. However, that instance announced that they are shutting down later this month. The current users over there were interested in setting up a new community but there wasn’t anybody that wanted to moderate. So, I offered my help in that respect. It just started this past week, so there isn’t much there yet, but I am going to try to keep posting any Gundam-related content I find over there.
      • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        I wanted to reach 100-150 users a week before creating a post to ask for volunteers to mod. I would rather not do it myself, too much on my plate already

    • Emotional_Series7814@kbin.melroy.org
      3·
      2 months ago

      I really liked the idea of LongReads but never subbed because most of the posts were depressing long reads.

      Checked now and I’m happy to see that alongside peoples’ insurance getting cut off, something about Trump, and something about abortion, there’s articles about knots and Guitar Hero.

  • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    I’ve recently started three communities, right now they are basically just me posting journal entries, or things I organically find along the internet.

    !metabolic_health@lemm.ee Is all science based journaling

    !ketogenic@dubvee.org Is casual LCHF discussion

    !carnivore@lemm.ee Is casual Carnivore discussion.

    The last community got lots of negative attention, the name was unfortunate, but that is the name in the literature and it is triggering for some of the other lemmy users. ASF is used on occasion, but that is mostly in agriculture literature.

    I’ve found it is useful to have a journal that you can link to, and discuss with people, so its a net positive use case, though it is very niche.

    For the casual communities I look for content that can prime the social pump so people feel comfortable interacting (mostly youtube cooking videos for now)