From my experience and from what I'm seeing there are two ways of how people get on the platform in general:
- slowly, over time - this results from people getting to know the platform through various ways
- rapidly, which basically results from some fuckup of other players, and it has to be a pretty big fuckup cause the strength of the bonds that people developed with FB, TT and reddit and the established network effect is huge.
I try to grow my instance. Obviously I'm doing approach number one, cause we are not in the middle of any fuckup currently. And it's tedious. People just ignore you. Cause your communities are basically empty. But they won't grow without people. And it's a vicious circle. And so when I'm doing that I don't have time to create content on the other hand. But creating content when nobody is reading is also tedious. But without content people won't come here. Another vicious circle!
And of course, in my case I'm alone. But we could assume that there is more than one person, maybe there are 2 or 3 or more. They might still struggle with similar problem.
So there is option number two - wait for the next fuckup. But you have to be prepared. So try to build content. Without engagement obviously. Talk to an empty wall. Like many succesful content creators did in the beginning. And then fuckup happens. And when you suddenly have a wave of new users, they see that you at least try to make a good content. This content might attract the wave.
Idk, I'm just wondering how I should invest my time and energy. Maybe we need to be flexible. Maybe do a little bit of both right?
What do you think about it? How do you grow your communities? Especially in the beginning? There should be some 101 article on this with some list or something. Or even a lemmy community "growing_fedi_community"
It's a very good question. I think whatever happens, we need to be patient. The Fediverse is not going to be big tomorrow. We need to make it nice to be here despite that.
I think trying your hardest to find stuff to post and comment on other posts as much as you can without it being artificial is the way to go.
I've also personally tried talking to people in real life about the Fediverse. Not about any particular instance but just starting with a conversation how social media sucks and there are alternatives out there. I think raising awareness like that is good, but it's slow of course.
Slow can also be good. Fast growth is very chaotic and can be quite disruptive.