They got excited, they expected other people to generate the content, and they got bored and left.
Starting a community takes real work, you got to do the legwork to get people aware, you've got a generate content to start the conversation, you've got to keep the ball rolling to keep people invested, it's a non-trivial work.
Founding a community then posting a request for moderators and walking away isn't going to cut it. It's a big time investment. So I salute the people who are doing it!
I hate the amount of people telling me to just start my own sub when I mention that I miss Reddit's variety. As if it was piss easy to get a whole community rolling by yourself
They're not being flippant. They want you to grow the community. They want to see it too. We're all here because we want to see Lemmy grow.
We're willing to help as much as we can. I'm posting way more than I would normally. In fact I usually only lurk. But I want to get content here. So if you make a community I'll post to it. As much as I can.
It really depends on the type of community. I created a few a missed from Reddit and honestly the screenshot/photo based communities are piss easy to start. !badrealestate for example is 3 weeks old with 48 posts and 3.6k subscribers. I just posted every day for a few weeks, now other people are posting and I contribute a couple of times a week.
On the other hand !tennis_fans and !downtherabbithole are much harder to get going because they require very regular or in depth text posts. Those two have less than 200 subscribers between them.
What I find really annoying is when people criticise posts on the communities I’ve created, when they haven’t contributed at all. People want more communities, people want more content. Don’t be a dick and then criticise the content that someone has put their time and effort into sharing with you for your enjoyment! Anyway, rant over.
If anyone’s browsing this thread and looking for more (active) communities to join, there’s also !DontYouKnowWhoIAm !clevercombacks !murderedbywords and !confidently_incorrect
Quite a few comments here about this, but thought I'd give a perspective as someone who started a couple of communities which have mostly proved pretty quiet.
They got excited, they expected other people to generate the content, and they got bored and left.
This is sort of me - although I haven't walked away, there's just nothing much to moderate.
I joined Lemmy as the momentum was building for the blackout protest in Reddit and, as I suspect many did, went looking for equivalent subs to those I was used to.
Two that I frequented regularly were for Arrested Development and MST3K, and not finding them on any instance, I decided to start them up here.
This was primarily to help people coming across from Reddit, perhaps just to have a tentative look at Lemmy, to feel like the places they were used to would be here too. I also made a few initial posts to try and provoke discussion, with minor, but non-zero success.
I was upfront about not having any mod experience, and from the start, I invited those who ran the subs on Reddit to get in touch if they wanted to do it here too.
One MST3K mod did just that, so now we are both mods, and the community does have a regular, if slow, trickle of submissions.
The AD community is quieter, but we have had a few posts, including one a few days ago, which was nice!
I guess, what I'm wondering is how much responsibility people feel mods have (or should have) to be generating content for the community on a regular basis? Genuinely, I'm not sure - I was a little concerned about it just being me shouting into the wind, partly because it can feel pointless, and partly because I didn't want to seem like I was dominating things.
Anyway, I just wanted to give an alternate viewpoint to those which are suggesting that people became mods as a power trip or whatever. That's certainly not the case for me - ideally, I don't even particularly want to be a mod, but I did want the communities to have a foothold for people arriving to Lemmy with no idea what to expect.
Anyway, I just wanted to give an alternate viewpoint to those which are suggesting that people became mods as a power trip or whatever. That’s certainly not the case for me - ideally, I don’t even particularly want to be a mod, but I did want the communities to have a foothold for people arriving to Lemmy with no idea what to expect.
There's a big difference between creating 2 communities and creating 20.
Yeah, actually moderating an online space with even modest activity is fucking hard and takes a shitton of time.
I think a lot of people underestimate the effort involved and quickly lose interest once it becomes apparent.
Basically this. I remember seeing a comment of someone being like "I created 50 communities, this is so fun!"
Well, it's so fun until you need to actually grow them
If I am the only person in a community though, it's awkward. Should I just post a bunch of stuff? Would that attract members on its own?
As awkward as it may feel, but if you are the only person creating content, then there IS content at least. It doesn't make sense to do nothing and just hope that other people will eventually fill the void, as random visitors will take one look at the community and think "eh, it's empty, no use in staying here" and just move on. Someone has to make the first step.
Of course a little bit of advertisement can't hurt as well, but content comes first.
Do it, the promote your community on [email protected]
There are usually people there who will help you, at least upvoting and commenting
What community are you planning to post to?
Make sure you go to each of the major lemmy instances and and subscribe, search, or ensure your community is federated for those instances
allfeed.Then just post, and try to spark interest and discussion, maybe once or twice a week, as a form of advertising your community exists and is a place for people interested in what have you
It's possible your posts could get boosted by new/all sorters and make it to hot/all even with no subscribers, but I would recommend trying to advertise the community and get subs first to improve your odds of growing your audience
There is a sub on reddit where for ~6 months 95% of the content was me, bunch of links staggered weekly. Then suddenly it picked up steam because somewhere off-reddit someone found it and dragged a whole bunch people along.
But if i hadn't been posting, then that wouldn't have happened.
I created a community on Lemmy.world named after my own username just to test things and post random shit... A lot of it gets upvoted so people are definitely seeing it but I don't think I've got any subscribers on that one...
I also had a night where I was pretty tipsy early on in my Lemmy days where I created a number of other communities... Only one or two have any subscribers and I'm usually still the .ain one who generates content.
Anyway, here's [email protected]
My guess: They were created expecting an in rush of users and content from R/ but when that didn't happen, they got bored and moved on.
There are many, many, r/sub clones that were created during the API shit. The people creating the subs had no intention of creating content, they just wanted to be a mod. Now they lie as empty as the day they were created.
they just wanted to be a mod
I don't know how many other people had the same thought, but I thought about snagging a couple community names, not because I have any interest in being a mod (I really don't at all,) but to hold onto them until either former reddit mods showed up or at least someone else who seemed like they had real interest in actually running the place and didn't seem to be an opportunistic power-tripping asshole who would run it into the ground.
I didn't end up doing it, but I gave it some serious consideration.
What do you get when you congeal the greasy bodies of a bunch of Reddit mods into one space? You get Reddit. Gross.
They are afraid that most of lemmy users will be on lemmy.world and want people to join diverse small instances. The other reason is the amount of attacks lemmy.world got
And what's the way to reinstate those communities? They might have very valuable names.
We're on the fediverse, you can create a community with the same name on another instance.
Most instances are well federated. So if it's not on Lemmy.world it can be on feddit.de or sh.itjust.works it still works, and considering .world uptime issues, I would advise any other lemmy instance or even a Kbin instance to a newcomer
honestly even if .world had 100% uptime i'd still recommend spreading out to smaller instances. it's a single point of failure for the entire network (or at least the parts of the network as seen by lemmy/kbin). bus factor and all
i personally hope that over time as the tooling improves (and as "turnkey" hosters like masto.host adopt lemmy), more topic-specific instances get started up. think of startrek.website or programming.dev or slrpnk or rblind or literature.cafe or all the country instances. and general purpose instances like .world and lemm.ee and sijw and what have you can be for smaller communities that don't have the resources, or they can be used as "account holder" instances that have people but "outsource" the communities to their own respective instances to keep their own costs down.
everyone piling up on .world is hurting the entire network. (even worse when they create communities and those communities also pile up on .world) and it's sad to see the .world admins refuse to acknowledge this and handwave it behind "well we're still smaller than mastodon.social /shrug" (and yes i have complaints about eugen's handling of mastodon.social/.online too)
Talk to the instance admins, and put a case to be the mod
Don't they still exist, they're just quiet?
Correct. They’re still there
Exactly - they haven't disappeared.
If someone staked a claim by starting a community, making it mod posts only and then going inactive, all thet need to do is contact the admins of that instance. As long as it's not risky to reopen (some can give life and death advice and need careful modding) the admin can open it and make them a mod.
If it's open and free to post then they can just start posting to it. They can contact the mod about possibly helping out and, if there's no sign of activity, they can contact the instance admins.
I mean I'd imagine it's pretty expected.
Lemmy.World was kind of the go to instance for exiting redditers during the mass exit over the API changes, while a majority of subreddits protested. As we all know, most of the subs did not stay closed. So a majority gave up
So that's the reason of normal posts downvoted to hell and troll comments?
It's very good that these people were not mods in the first place. They just wanted first dibs and to let everyone else make content for them.
