I like !tenforward@lemmy.world and the newly created !lotrmemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com, both often feature OC - not exclusively but being kinda known for a preference and offering of such. Maybe !starwarsmemes@lemmy.world too, but it’s far less active.
But if people want to offer content, they will. Except often the environment is not welcoming, so it’s a bit of a cache-22 needing solid moderation first, but needing solid content even first-er, which leads to super power mods who know how having to do most of the mod work.
It’s not easy, but we do seem to be growing, even as it looks like from the count of actual people we’re probably shrinking just a tiny bit, though those here are more active. Mostly in comments rather than posts.
I agree with you 100%, but I think the root of the problem during the reddit exodus was that people wanted to grow at any cost so they allowed reposts, low effort and bots/scripts that kept bringing in things from reddit or non-news… which honestly was a lot of things except solid content, now people are so used to those things that we don’t really have anything to offer outside of those communities, the rest is just a reddit copy-paste.
Except, again, I see so many people commenting that they don’t want to post content, for fear of the feedback that they will get. You cannot force people to do something against their will.
And content creators in particular are a special breed: they don’t care as much about using Arch Linux btw, or perhaps politics, so much as reaching a wider audience. And we are not very tolerant here to outsiders POV (go visit lemmy.ml without a logged-in account and tell me what you see there on the front page or two? its default sort is Local btw, so don’t change that -> this is what newcomers seem to most often see, as that is the #1 instance recommendation by a Google search, not DDG but Google, as in what a mainstream normie would use; tbf the anti-Western world barrage might have calmed down since the elections?).
Particularly the downvote barraging - I’ve posted literal award-winning content that gets as many downvotes as upvotes, by people who seemed to not know what was being offered. Oh well. Once a post is made, we can and often do have nice conversations here, but we just as often have conversations with trolls. We are not terribly welcoming. Especially hexbear.
But take another look at those communities I mentioned - often those are OC. Not always, but sometimes.
