• wjs018@lemmy.world
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      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.world
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        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.world
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      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.