If you want your community to grow, there’s things you can do to help. Some of them are better than others. What are things that are good for the Fediverse, and what are some things that are better left on other platforms? Here’s a few things and my opinions

  • Clickbaity titles (“Liberals DESTROYED by LOGIC”) - No thank you.

  • Consistent posting - Yes. If you start a community, you’ll probably be the only one posting on there for a while. It’s easier to bootstrap a community if it’s something that comes with content ready-to-go somehow to make your job easier.

  • GIFs - I’ve been using this over in !observances@midwest.social. That’s about as growth-hacky as I’d like to get, but I’m pretty sure people are more likely to engage with animated GIFs than static images for communities like that.

  • Sources - I think this is something that can differentiate the Fediverse from other platforms. On my posts in !outofcontextcomics@lemmy.world, I’ve been spending time to source everything before posting it. This makes sure I don’t accidentally post edited images that I’ve seen over in /r/outofcontextcomics, and makes the Fediverse show up in searches. That actually probably hurts growth a little bit, but IMO is worth it

  • Transcribing - Another differentiator for the Fediverse. Everything’s been done by hand and it’s been great. I’ve been transcribing my posts in !outofcontextcomics@lemmy.world and I’ve been very happy to see that search engines are already picking those up.

  • Corgana@startrek.websiteEnglish
    1·
    7 hours ago

    This is a good thought provoking post, but I think most of the methods you describe here actually work against the Fediverse, both in terms of desired outcomes and actual growth.

    • If a user comes to Lemmy (for example) and sees the same stale meme feed and engagement bait they see on Reddit, what’s the incentive to switch? What makes Lemmy unique?

    • Of the users who are here and understand the reasons for not using commercial social media, most are probably trying to avoid the bulk of the sort of content made by the suggestions you give.

    • Growth-for-growth’s-sake puts more burden on instance admins for reasons that don’t involve growing a sense of community (presumably the reason they are investing time in the first place).

    My point is that Lemmy can never compete with Reddit in terms of attention and distractability and trying to build “community” around that here will always fail. We should lean into Lemmy’s strengths, focus on growing communities and discussions and the kind of thing the Reddit algorithm suppresses.