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 [email protected]. 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 [email protected], 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 [email protected] and I've been very happy to see that search engines are already picking those up.
One I use, is stagger crossposts.
If you're not sharing something time sensitive, post to each relevant community with several hours of time delay inbetween. (I often do days or even weeks)
This will prevent the usual de-duplication of the posts, thereby preventing the biggest post from cannibalizing the upvotes from the rest, and is a soft excuse to repost something a few times.
People will discover the communities which were posted to earlier, from the newr posts. I try to go from smallest to biggest in order, as the first will benefit the most.
Neat! I independently came to the same conclusion!
There should probably be an easy way to upvote the crossposts without visiting each one
I filed an issue on Github for this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2825
I'm not convinced there should be. I think any feature that treats different commumities as somehow the same thing, even if they have the same content, is ultimately bad for the ecosystem. It trains users to see communities as interchanheable, and to see value in Lemmy and the fesiverse primarily in consumption, rather than discussion.
We can't compete on consumption. It won't sustain this space.