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 :)
[email protected]
[email protected]

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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"You should create a group when demand is there and not the other way around." In other words, start from generalist communities, and create more specialized ones when there is a need. Do you agree? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Back with newsgroups the general rule was to go from general to specific. You start with a general discussion group and when discussions about video games get annoying you create a games group. If then there are too many Baldur’s Gate discussions you create BG. If they are dominated by Baldur’s Gate 3 you create a Baldur’s Gate 3 group. If everyone is fawning over Withers you create a Withers group which of course will be flooded with discussion about the Withers’ tits mod, which shall get its own group.

Meaning you should create a group when demand is there and not the other way around.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think what needs to be tacked on is you need the generalized communities to point to the niches. Sure, you can start the formula1 or flightsim community immediately - that group already exists outside the fediverse and you just need to give them a new location. Sure.

But for your niche communities, you need the general community to be a launching off point for the others. You need the gamer who's interested in different controllers to see the other flightsim community exists and decide to follow it too. You need to give the average person a way to discover the community without already knowing explicitly that it exists.

Otherwise, you'll only attract people who are migrating from one service to another(and doing a 1:1 swap of their communities) and not reach the general audience. A lot of hobbies or communities I've joined were because of someone else mentioning it in a different but related community.

Think about people in general: no one starts by saying they want to program data tables in Python. They start with a general interest in computers and move on from there.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Otherwise, you’ll only attract people who are migrating from one service to another(and doing a 1:1 swap of their communities) and not reach the general audience. A lot of hobbies or communities I’ve joined were because of someone else mentioning it in a different but related community.

I don't see how we contradict each other. I didn't say we shouldn't create general communities. My point was that we don't necessarily need to wait for a visible demand in a general community because it might never manifest itself for smaller things, although people might be silently looking for them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

We don't really disagree. I think you should make the communities. But I also think they won't grow until they're being mentioned on the general community.