I was thinking about this last night. I would never have bothered to make this much content for a place like Reddit or Facebook as there is just too much attention on other things. Over the last year I’ve spent who knows how much time making, finding, and editing content on here and engaging people to try to keep their attention. It’s nice in that I feel heard, but it’s also such a small crowd, I notice when people show up and start participating, but also when they stop participating. I’ve built a pretty big following for Lemmy. I’m currently juuuuust not making the first page of biggest communities, but I feel I’m doing well for a niche community here. But the given number of regular commentors I get feels like it hasn’t increased over the last 9 months. As soon as I get new people that comment and participate, the same number drop off. It just feels like I’m not getting anywhere, and it makes me question this as a platform. I’ve got about a half dozen people I’d call regulars, and new people pop in and out, but if I stop to think about the effort in, I wonder how much minimum user feedback I can get by with to do this another whole year.
My current goal is to make it to December and do the Superbowl Owl of the Year Tournament again. That was a huge boost to the community for those few weeks, but that was a toooon of effort to do by myself. Thankfully someone usually chimes in with some positivity and has a very enthusiastic response to something I’ve shared that can boost my morale, but it really is tough to keep putting work into what many times feels like a void. I always make sure to thank commentors for saying nice things or just participating, because I wouldn’t keep doing this without them. I always tell anyone who listens the commentors are just as important as the posters because you won’t have one without the other.
I hope for great success for everyone on Lemmy as a platform, but we all need to always try to be more active than we are if that’s going to happen. Just post a “I really enjoyed this! Thanks so much for sharing!” once every day or so if you don’t feel you have anything topical to add to a post you enjoyed. I know it means a lot to me to see that on my work, and I’m sure it does to most posters. Even when I just share a picture, I may have spent an hour scrolling to find you that pic, verify it’s not AI or stolen, and find a little fact or something to add to the post, It’s a really quick and easy way to do a nice thing to show someone that made something for your enjoyment that it reached someone.
Hey, I think I saw you post on that “how to get a bit more of positivity” conversation recently. I make a post there listing a bunch of communities that were not news, memes, or tech. And I realized that most of them were powered by a single person. So they’d often have a reasonable number of upvotes, and occasional discussion, but a single person would do all/most of the posting.
That’s probably not a good thing. I mean, if a specific dozen people left lemmy, we’d be left with only news, memes, and tech communities. And you’re talking about some of the pressures that can make these “community drivers” leave. I can think of a couple possible solutions:
- help those community drivers to find backups or co-drivers
- let people know that it’s OK to just take over a dormant community and start posting
I’m not sure how to implement this, though.
I did see you had Superbowl on your list and I’m always happy to see other people promote it. It’s big enough now that I’ve slowed down promoting it myself so I don’t seem pushy. It’s been a ton of work, but it’s with it to know it makes people a little happier each day.
News, memes, and tech do seem pretty dominating here, and while it’s nice getting notification of all that stuff in one place, I still prefer to go to actual news sites I trust. If I spend too much time doing it here, I feel I read more comments than actual articles, and half the comments seem to be made before actually reading the article, so it’s easy to get misinformed or biased opinions rather than facts
I’ve not sought out any direct help for a few reasons. The primary reason is my content is all stuff that I like. It’s a labor of love and not a job. I share what I do because I like it and I think you might like it too. If I asked someone to help me out, I’d feel like they’re working for me and trying to post what I’d want, but what they’d want. Bigger projects like the long articles and Owl of the Year are also my personal vision, and honestly, I want those done exactly my way, so again, I don’t want to make someone else carry out my vision and be frustrated if they can’t do that
Also, I feel the people that create the communities should be more active in their actual management. I didn’t start Superbowl, so I’m just a guest. I share my stuff and try to make it a better place, and that’s the end of my role. Earlier on, I thought it might be better to join with Birding or some other community, or maybe instead start a Raptors community where I could also do hawks, eagles, vultures, etc. Superbowl had a good bit of Reddit momentum, which I believe helped make things self-sustaining faster than for some other communities. I think combining small groups would be the way to go for a lot of things, but that isn’t my call.
Ultimately for growth though, it can’t be a daily responsibility for anyone. Maybe if you had a group of 5-10 people that can post daily, like those big politics, news, tech groups do, but most communities would be better served by 30 people posting 1 things a month than 1 person posting 30 things a month. It makes it diverse, and that will pull in more people as the flavor of the group will be less one note, and losing one or 2 people doesn’t hurt the group as much.
As much as you like my content, their might be some that like different things than me. Like I don’t enjoy many of the really small owls as much. When I do post them, many love them, but I don’t post them much because they don’t interest me. If someone that did love them shared them passionately, that would invigorate that group more than I could. Also, if you didn’t like my writing style or if I just write too much or too little, a handful of people writing in their own voice would be great.
I do think some instances have communities to try and get inactive communities into new hands, but if they’re dead, they’re probably not big enough to be self-sustaining. I see you post to a few music communities, but it would probably be easier and reach more eyes if they were under a broader scope than synthwave and gothic industrial. People on here seem to have great interest in music discovery in a way that humans can do that algorithms can’t. Perhaps having a broader scope where you can say, hey if you like “popular song x” you should check out “under the radar song y” that might get more attention. I’m into music creation and synths more than most random people, and I couldn’t tell you what electronic music is in what genre, so my chance of stumbling on one of those posts is small at this point even though I’m much closer to your audience. But the principals of being defederated from other groups seems to fly in the face of people seeing they’re not getting traffic, reaching out to each other, and merging control of their communities.
But I think that’s necessary. Just about all of us probably stumbled upon an already established and powerful state of Reddit, where we didnt need to put in as much work to get eyes. We could jump in a sub with thousands or millions of eyes already on it. We don’t have that power here yet. But we’re also small enough but large enough you can get a following relatively quick if you do put in the work.
This is getting long, and I’ve probably given you a bit to think about, so I’ll leave it here for now. It’s given me some things to think about too but having to type out my thoughts. We all want Lemmy to be big and great, but it’s gotta occur naturally. We can’t force it. We’ve got to look and experiment and see what works and what doesn’t. Evolution doesn’t happen in one generation, it takes many trials and errors. We’ve just got to keep at making this place the best we can and the rest will follow when it’s time.
Thanks for the thoughtful response, there’s plenty there that I’ve been thinking over.
Thank you for your service! I don’t have much energy for posting myself, but I do try to be an active (and appreciative) consumer. 😁
Thanks a million for all your efforts. It’s because of people like you that we have cool content here at all.
Unfortunately, I’m still not as active as I probably should be. I’ll try to do better.