this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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Fedigrow
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To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
Resources:
- https://lemmy-federate.com/ to federate your community to a lot of instances
- [email protected] to organize overall fediverse growth
- [email protected] to keep tabs on where new users might come from :)
Megathreads:
- How (and when) to consolidate communities? (A guide)
- Where to request inactive or unmoderated communities? (A list)
Rules:
- Be respectful
- No bigotry
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Ban them.
Lemmy is so young (and feeble) that users like those are an actual threat to your community and the larger network by driving away those who actually contribute to the community. In 2019, TrueBirch from Reddit analysed the data and concluded that only 1.9% of users actually comment or post while 98.1% just lurks. When your community is has a thousand or so users, it's entirely reasonable to protect those ~20 users who are creating content for the rest. In fact, the majority of the rest likely don't upvote things either.
I've heard this described as "the 1% Rule", which more or less goes like: In online communities, 1% of the users generate 90% of the content, 9% of the users create 10% of the content by reacting to, modifying or generally interacting with that 1%, and the other 90% of people are lurkers. This fits quite well with what I've seen on online communities myself for decades. So, if you alienate that 1%, your community will eventually either disappear or become a hollow reflection of what it used to be.
Absolutely, and it's already pretty hard to bootstrap a community organically† to so you should not hesitate to do what's necessary to keep it healthy as small communities cannot moderate themselves easily.
† From How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake Accounts:
Came in with the opposite view, but this convinced me and changed my mind.
Glad to hear! As I said, Lemmy is still so young that it makes perfect sense. Even much more mature and much larger communities take similar measures:
I'm not saying that downvotes are bad, but that people abusing downvote mechanism are bad and that it's okay to ban such users while bootstrapping a community.
Thank you for the data
I'd argue that lemmy is so young, and small, that communication first is a viable, and better, way to start.