• MentalEdge
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    2 months ago

    If the person from another site wanted to post it on Lemmy themselves, I would do the exact same thing. Encouraging and preferreing that they do so themselves.

    As for encouraging activity, I am absolutely succeeding. I measure success as simply whether there are people upvoting, and therefore enjoying, my posts. Why compare ourselves to Reddit?

    My first community was !gameart@sopuli.xyz which now has three other regular posters aside from myself and a growing sub-count of 1.5k.

    My moe communities are very niche but my bot for posting to them is only getting better, and over this last year several other posters have come and gone, some of which are still active (most notably the other poster on !kemonomoe@ani.social).

    There’s also a handful of occasional posters like toes and graybackgroundmusic.

    I have even spotted the occasional artist posting to the moe communities, though as they actually do the incredible work of producing the art they post, they do so very seldom.

    My proudest success has been !dungeonmeshi@ani.social which despite only just hitting 400 subs, has consistently stayed at 700 mau, suggesting there’s a ton of room to grow. Posts get A LOT of interactions considering it’s a manga/show specific sub, and the episode discussions had commenters EVERY week.

    Lots of us mods discuss how to effectively grow the threadiverse/fediverse over on !fedigrow@lemm.ee, check it out!

    I think Lemmy>Microblog federation has been borked for a while. I tried to sub to some of my communities to get the federation over to that side of the fediverse, but the subs don’t go through, if that gets fixed, communities and posts could reach much more people.

    I also want to go see if I can maybe find some artists over on the microblog side, and let them know they can make their Mastodon/whatever posts show up in relevant communities on the threadiverse by mentioning them.

    • 柊 つかさ@lemmy.worldOPM
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      2 months ago

      What I meant with activity was people posting. My initial goal was to kickstart communities by posting but having those communities be self sustaining in the end. I compare to reddit simply because I wanted communities for topics I like on the fediverse just like they had on reddit. Those communities are robust in this sense: take away a few random people from the set of people that posts. The community would survive easily, enough people would continue to interact. Now compare that to my communities. If I get hit by a bus, they are dead immediately. I have this Ghibli community with more than 1000 subs. When I was of lemmy for a month, the monthly users dropped to zero (same with all other communities)! I care not only for decentralisation in a technical sense but also in a social sense. My communities are not socially decentralised: there is a single point of failure which is me (I only stopped posting not moderating, although there was nothing to moderate lo). To get robust self sustaining communities for, let’s say, individual slice of life anime from yesteryear you need a certain amount of contributing users. Contributing users are x% of the subscribed/interested. The subscribed/interested are y% of the platform user base. Therefore the platform user base needs to achieve a certain critical mass. For example, lemmy did achieve this critical mass for more general topics like linux. But the more niche the topic, the harder it is to hit this threshold. It’s good to hear that you have been achieving your goals. I just don’t think I can say that for myself at all. Lately I have been working on this cringe anime database with some kind of semantic search (it has a type system 🤣). Given how hard it is to get a Lucky Star community going I doubt anyone will be adding Lucky Star database entries soon!

      • MentalEdge
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        2 months ago

        I’d really appreciate it if you used paragraphs. Would make reading longer comments like that one a little nicer.

        Like you say, redundant activity is extremely difficult, and the second and third posters only show up when a community already seems active. It’s a catch 22.

        On Lemmy, as it is new, we are still in a phase where people like you and me who are out to post things, are more likely to create new communities instead of finding existing ones where the things they want to post would fit in.

        That’s kinda why I shifted gears and made actively looking out for posts that might fit in in more places part of the my deal. To get that redundancy and overlap going, so that even if I disappear, others might still be around posting similar stuff, and so that the people posting to their own communities, might start posting to each others communities, too.

        For the same reason, I want to see if I can get Mastodon users involved with the threadiverse. There are lots of artists over there, and they are already used to hashtags to make relevant things visible to people looking for it, so I don’t think it’s a stretch that if only the active users over there knew more about the threadiverse, there could be more interaction.

        Hopefully Mastodon’s support for groups will eventually bring even better interoperability.