this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023

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Can you please give me some tips on how to grow and popularize a Lemmy community? (programming.dev)

submitted 2 years ago by sisyphean@programming.dev to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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I’m a moderator of a smaller community. I’m posting quality content multiple times a day, and I posted about it in New Communities. The number of subscribers is low but it’s growing steadily.

Could you please give me some advice on growing this community? I don’t want to spam/flood or come off as rude or weird, but I really believe in it and think it would be useful to many people.

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[–] MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

You need to get at least one user on another instance to sub to your community manually. Before you do that, you will only be discoverable by users on the local instance. Once you get that first user, posts in your community will start appearing in "all" on that other instance.

After you get a sub from some other instance, regular posting will help users find you by just seeing posts from your community on their instance, and they can easily click the community name and sub to it.

Aside from this fediverse-specific quirk, @thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee already posted some good tips.

[–] sisyphean@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago

Oh thanks, this is an important thing to know!

[–] linh@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Excuse me but may I ask why posts of my community don't show up on other instances? I made accounts on other instances to manually search it myself, it is discoverable on those instances. However new posts are not.

[–] MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Do you have at least one sub from that instance (yourself?) if you do, posts should immediately appear in "all" on any connected instances.

There is a bug, where if you mod someone on an outside instance, and they edit anything about the community, it will break federation. I made this mistake with !fitmoe@lemmy.world and had to talk to the instance admin to have it resolved.

[–] linh@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

Oh right the instances that I subbed got new posts while the one I didn't sub is still empty. No modding involved tho.

[–] agarorn@feddit.de 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Constant work. Such online communities have an exponential growth pattern. So you probably have a certain amount of time after which you double.

This is obviously very apparent when you have 10k subs, and on the next day it is 10,1k. But when you are at 10 subs it can take days for the next to arrive.

Just go on posting and the thing will start to take off. If you stop, or other active members stop the community might die.

[–] sisyphean@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago

Thank you! I will just keep posting every day then.

[–] thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Work it into the conversation when you're talking to people elsewhere (I don't mod any communities but am interested in seeing them grow and this has been the #1 successful tactic)
Don't be weird about mentioning it in general. For example, why does this post not say what your community is or have a link for people to follow?
Don't just post links that people can click on, think "huh" and then move on. Post questions or other interactive things to draw out lurkers.
Team up with mods of related communities to maintain a list of "neighbours" that you all pin to make it easy for your users to find more stuff they're interested in.
Make sure to respond to anyone who does happen to wander in and leave a post or comment, don't leave them hanging
Advertise it on your other social media since presumably you're hanging around people with the same interests

[–] sisyphean@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Thank you, these are excellent tips! Btw here is the community: https://programming.dev/c/auai (!auai@programming.dev) - I didn't want to mention it because I didn't want my post to sound like cheap self-promotion, but I guess I'm a bit too shy in this regard.

The icon and the cover image are terrible, I'm planning to replace them later.

[–] Scooter411@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

I would say look to other areas that might have some overlap in interest and point them in your direction.

[–] fennec@feddit.de 1 points 2 years ago

I think it just takes time. I’m also posting to a community that currently has 7 subscribers (and I think that includes me, haha) but I enjoy posting there since I care about the topic. Growth will come naturally, but I mostly care about exchanging ideas and just general conversation with other fans.

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