I cheated the system and just politely usurped an existing comm with a few hundred subscribers thanks to prior Reddit fame! đ
On a more serious note, I was telling someone today that I mainly try to give them content they won't be able to get anywhere else, including on r/superbowl. I filter through the hell of Facebook to pick out things they don't want to sort through, or I do summaries of research papers they don't have time to read. I search for sources of content with small audiences.
I also try to engage with everyone that replies to me. I value all my commenters, and them chiming in grows the group as much as me posting, so I want them to feel like kings and queens for participating so they come back. They can go anywhere for content, but they gave me a chance, so I want them to come back to me first next time.
Owl of the Year was also a big 2 or 3 week event that really picked up steam quickly, and will hopefully draw people back again this year. Not sure how replicable that is for most of you, but I'm glad I tried it.
Thanks for sharing all that!
I just added my own community building approach in this thread, but you've both articulated some stuff I hadn't mentioned as well as given me ideas, thanks.
Thanks for your expérience!
I try to post every day, so that the community stays active.
I try to stay on generic communities so that they have more chances to appeal to a large audience.
For communities that are discussion oriented, I try to ask questions as open as possible to invite people to comment.
Pretty similar to you. I try to post regularly, though I'm trying to grow some more niche subs related to spaceflight and space exploration.
Open-ended discussion questions are a great idea, but I sometimes struggle to come up with good ones.
I think there's a pressure to come up with good and thought provoking questions to end our posts with, but in many cases, I don't think this is necessary.
Don't set the bar high. Especially if you're doing something niche. If we want people to interact, give them something simple, since they may not know much about your topic. Many of my subs say they don't feel they have anything to add since they don't have the knowledge of the topic I do. Not that I'm an experts, I'm just a few months of personal research ahead of them.
I can tell them more in one post than they know about the whole topic and that can be intimidating. My regulars will interact with that stuff, and some new people may be impressed, but the simple ones where it's just a neat pic and I say "hey, what do you like about this?" or "you prefer the one on the right or left?" are typically more popular because anyone can say something, and that first comment is the critical one because it gets other people to comment as the ice has been broken.
Also, not sure if it helps, but I'll often add my question as a comment so it will look like someone already engaged while they're scrolling and hopefully be more inclined to click through and maybe comment.
I've said this several times both here and at the other place, but it seems to me there's a big opportunity these days for any particular community posts to be randomly seen on ALL, which obviously has a lot less likelihood at Reddit. As the FV grows, that may be less of a possibility, so jumping on it now seems like a good idea.
So currently, just finding a little bit of good visual content (usually accompanied by a link and or mini-review) and posting once on a near-daily basis seems to keep snagging users without having to do anything else.
I also try to maintain a community index and major keyword searches to make it easier for users to find stuff that might interest them. After nine months of such regular work, there's now a whole bunch of decent content for users from any other platform to dive in to and enjoy for many hours, or longer.
I hope to keep adding content (particular the original content, such as mini-articles & reviews) such that it's going to be harder and harder for the internet to ignore our community. Of course eventually, I plan on flaming out in a supernova of resentment and hurt feelings, deleting everything and erasing all my backups.
(eh, JK about that last part)
So currently, just finding a little bit of good visual content (usually accompanied by a link and or mini-review) and posting once on a near-daily basis seems to keep snagging users without having to do anything else.
Thanks for sharing, definitely my experience as well. Usually, if the content is a bit appealing, it will end up in the 3 first pages of Top of 12 hours
My main Strategie is to Daily post, and for communitys where thats hard, having a good consistent scheduel st the least is always good.
Also always Crosspost if possible. Crossposting was the main way how back in the day, I got my Faivourite reddit community from 1000 to 10000 Subscribers, and it still work pretty well here as well
Not all apps show crossposts yet, or don't do so prominently. And a post going big in one community, can cannibalize all the other cross-posts due to de-duplication, meaning only one post gets the lions share of votes.
I've since changed my posting tool to actually make the various cross-posts at different times, instead of all at once.
This works well with my communities as art isn't time sensitive, and it's also kind of an excuse to re-post something a couple times, so different people can see it.
For others alongside OP:
Have people tried outreach from both other fediverse stuff (e.g. Mastodon) and non-fediverse stuff?Given Lemmy doesn't interface super well with microblogging (yet), it seems like it may help a little to mention there's options for independent/federated forum/group discussions via Lemmy/K~Mbin/Piefed, etc. apart from a.gup.pe or Friendica.
I know I have (and still do from time to time), but most of the people don't really bother when they look at the numbers in communities. 50k as the whole of Lemmy is nice, but not enough to invite people to add Lemmy communities to their posts.
Also, microblogging and link aggregators populations don't mesh well from my experience, there is a reason why they are on one type of platform and not the other
