this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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Fedigrow

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To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

Well, I don't know if "niche" is the best term, but I'm still pretty alone posting on

I also started two others recently

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Part of the problem is the smaller instances don't even see those communities when you post, I was unaware of 75% of the communities you just listed. I have a micro instance, and if I don't subscribe I don't see it.

It's probably not much of an issue, given that most people are on a couple mega instances...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Hey, nice to see you here!

I know community discoverability can be an issue. When I launched [email protected] and [email protected], I used my alts on the top 10 instances to subscribe to them so that they would show in the All feed of those instances.

For small instances, I tried to post too to [email protected] and [email protected], but beyond that there isn't really much I can do.

There was a tool that could help address that (I don't have the name right now), but last time I tried it, it wasn't working, so I'm not sure it's that useful.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Good to be seen! Smart of you to preseed The larger instances good strategy

I think the clients are going to have to solve this, maybe look at the all feed on multiple servers, and then only show you what's different compared to your own server.

Discoverability is the key weakness of Lemmy, just like mastodon

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Not sure clients might be the solution here, I think at the end people will have to choose

  • go to a large instance and rely on other people to populate the All feed for you
  • go to a small instance but know that you'll have to subscribe to most of the communities yourself
[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Are you familiar with Lemmy Federate? Participating instances get a bot that follows submitted communities to get them in feeds and then unsubscribes once a real user from the instance subs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Ah, that's the cool I was looking for! Are we sure this tool is completely functional? The large number of "in progress" instances always gives me doubt

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It used to be Lemmy Community Boost and I think it still works despite the status. I do keep meaning to track the developer down and give them a nudge.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

I do see now that many instances have auto-add turned off, that could be what were seeing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I'm not sure tbh. Pretty sure it's run by the lemy.lol admin?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (5 children)

The tool relies on community local subscriber count to unsubscribe and that value was not available from 0.19.0 to 0.19.3. I fixed the problem about 8 months ago but due to unfortunate timing, it didn’t reach prod from then.

In the end, the tool is working. The only problem is, it doesn’t know if it should unsubscribe on 0.19.0 to 0.19.3. So it stays in in progress state but still federates the community.

Once all instances upgrades to 0.19.4, it will work correctly both functionally and visually.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

Also @[email protected]; the auto add feature is for adding new local communities to the tool automatically. With it, users don’t need to add their communities manually to the tool because it will do it automatically.

But the federation is not relies on that tick. If the instance is enabled, it will subscribe to all communities no matter if auto add is enabled or not.

I guess I need to improve the explanations cuz at this state it is so confusing :)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Thanks for the information - very useful. And yes, an FAQ would be handy, although if you wait long enough it'll be less necessary.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The second scenario is viable, if Lemmy was a lot more vibrant, and had enough population that the niche communities could keep you busy. Right now I wake up and check Lemmy and I've gotten through all the new posts in 20 minutes. So it's getting kind of quiet

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

It is indeed quiet.

I wanted to try something and blocked all news/memes/tech/politics communities last week, my All feed is definitely much more quieter.

Which I don't mind, but there is definitely stuff to do to get it the communities "beyond memes-tech-news" active

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

Checking [email protected] can be useful sometimes

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Yeah you pretty much have to use https://lemmyverse.net/communities

There's a feature request here that would help https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2951

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Consider participating in lemmy-federate.com/ ? That should help.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Dragged Dragonball over to my instance.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (4 children)

@[email protected] can you create [email protected] so we can try and transition that community over to there blaze is doing amazing work in terms of making it feel active, but I'm all about decentralization. I also think @[email protected] and @[email protected] would both be great as part of the moderation team.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (15 children)

To be honest as mentioned elsewhere I'm not the most convinced about having all of the theme instances managed by rglullis.

Raphael, don't get me wrong, you are doing a very good job, and I really hope you'll succeed with your new NLNet grant, but having all of those instances depending on you, even if you seem to have a backup person, seems risky.

@[email protected], also the Euro 2024 is starting later this week, I think it's just too late to migrate now if we want a decent level of activity during the event. We can always revisit later, but I wouldn't move now.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

I do own lemmy.futbol if someone would want to co create an instance, but frankly I do not have a lot of free time so I could only help out in a supporting capacity

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (3 children)

You really dislike "main", huh?

There is also [email protected], if you prefer.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I've been most invested into helping [email protected] get going. It seems like there are plenty of lurkers and a growing amount of engagement by comments, but people are still shy about posting links or discussions. News in the genre has been slow the past couple months, though.

I tried with [email protected]. As a general rule, I'll prioritize posting content to smaller instances, and I picked out that community on my home instance to do so, but I think it's just not happening. I'm moving over to [email protected].

I'm also glad [email protected] is doing well. Seems like they've got a good plan going on over there, with relevant stickies, a useful sidebar, and link exchange.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

Houseplants community seems great!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

I like the houseplants stuff. I will add something useful to the bicycletouring sidebar too.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I started to post recently to [email protected], good activity over there (after all, it's Linux on Lemmy), other people have started posting there too

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I'm really digging the Linux content on Lemmy, it's already pretty lively

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

To be fair, that's probably the one topic the vast majority of users care about ha ha

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Kinda happy how at the start of the season [email protected] got a bit of traffic. But i'm not all that hopeful really because the regular bicycling subs with way more subscribers have also very little traffic. I sometimes wonder if all that even makes sense here if it isn't about computers, memes or politics.

The camping, ultralight, outdoor communities are pretty much just dead.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Kinda happy how at the start of the season [email protected] got a bit of traffic. But i’m not all that hopeful really because the regular bicycling subs with way more subscribers have also very little traffic.

Nice that you got a bit of traffic. Maybe it stays low because people interesting in bicycle touring aren't that much on Reddit, without even mentioning Lemmy?

The camping, ultralight, outdoor communities are pretty much just dead.

Can you please provide links? Should they maybe try to consolidate at first, to get more activity in one place?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yeah it is a niche activity, sure.

[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

Camping i think theoretically has some actual users, the solarpunkers seem to mostly repost stuff, not do or plan to do something. I don't think consolidation will do much.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (5 children)

Maybe try to redirect people from [email protected] to [email protected] ? Some subscribers might like to be told there is another active community

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (6 children)

Good activity on [email protected], thanks to post from @[email protected] and @UKFilmNerd@feddit.uk

There is some progress on a potential bot, that would help for sure

Still a bit frustrating to see that the moderation team on [email protected] isn't doing much with that place, but that's life I guess

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

Good activity on [email protected], thanks to post from @[email protected] and @[email protected]

Happy to have somewhere to post film news - I get a tonne in my feed but there are so many film communities I hadn't got round to figuring out which to commit to. You helped that choice along.

Still a bit frustrating to see that the moderation team on [email protected] isn’t doing much with that place, but that’s life I guess

In the end, you can only worry about your own communities.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I have a habit of sharing news that only really interests me. That's why I don't share everything I come across. A friend and I used to run a website together, and I got quite used to posting the latest film trailers and interesting news that I came across. Although sometimes I found it really hard to post news about films I didn't really care about. I had to write something to accompany the video.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I've been trying to get a bit of life into [email protected] and [email protected] - Rome wasn't sacked in a day though and experience suggests bloody minded persistence is the key.

I also started [email protected] - still early days.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

A couple weeks ago I started occasionally posting to [email protected] when the main daily poster said they were taking a week off. That worked out nicely. They were offline for a week again recently and I "filled in the gap" again with daily posting.

I was posting music links daily to [email protected] last August but ran through my main playlist by March. I've been trying to post at least once a week since then.

[email protected] only gets sporadic posting. I'm trying to post once a week.

On [email protected] the regular poster said they were out of content. A couple of us said we'd post, but personally I only have like 4-5 more posts worth of content.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Nice communities!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

[email protected] is still doing ok, though not quite at its peak. I don't think new subs are going up by much these days. I have seen comments by a few new names, which is very nice to see. Overall comment levels are about the same. Upvotes seem steady, but not as high as they were around the new year. I do think the year end festivities really boosted things though.

I'm happy to be ahead of [email protected] again though (no offense, I love opossums too, but I want to be #1 wild animal sub!) and I look to be top of the 2nd page of communities overall, so even though I'm not doing quite as well as I perhaps feel I should be doing, I feel I can't complain too much.

I still get a few positive compliments each week and people are sharing their personal stories with owls, which is always nice to hear. As long as I know the content is making people happy, I feel it's worth the work.

I've enjoyed having a few things to share with the [email protected] community. I've gotten some great recommended reading materials from that group in return. Maybe I'll have to look into more collabs and get some cross promotion going.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Trying my best to keep casual HistoryLemmy alive. Sometimes I get contributors with great stuff in HistoryPorn, but I'm almost entirely alone in HistoryArtifacts, HistoryIllustrations, HistoryRuins, and HistoryMemes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

It's hard, we probably made too many communities too quickly lol. But then again if you have a topic you're obsessed about then it's nice to have somewhere to post without worrying about spamming. Like I can't just endlessly post things about The 7th Guest or Deus Ex Randomizer to a normal games community, but spamming my own communities I do get some upvotes so I guess some people enjoy these posts.

I feel like people have been conditioned by Reddit to be hesitant about making posts. There's no reason for posting to have a high barrier of entry. Maybe we need to be more willing to post things, like people chatting in Discord.

And comments too, especially comments in old posts, Lemmy handles it way better than Reddit so feel free to drop comments in year old posts lol. Occasionally sort your feed by "New Comments" or "Active". I have a widget on my phone's home screen that shows my Subscribed feed sorted by New Comments. It was fun with old school forums and it's still fun on Lemmy.

Everyone else is linking their communities so what the hell https://lemmy.mods4ever.com/communities

Also [email protected]

And I post a lot to [email protected] and [email protected] even though I'm not a mod

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