So, I love this site. I’ve been here more-or-less since the beginning, across various accounts. I also have accounts on other Lemmy instances.
One common pattern I see is that instances branch out their communities too soon, and overly dilute the conversation. It makes an instance that is ultimately not that active (compared to any of the big sites that don’t need naming, really) appear to be even less lively, due to so many instances with either nothing at all, a few month old posts, or a generic post linking to a projects blog.
Note that I am not criticizing the instance by pointing out the low activity levels - I really do love this place. It’s just a fact at the moment. You can switch viewing posts by new and scroll down a little to see we get around 5 - 6 posts per hour, occasionally a bit more and occasionally a bit less.
I think that having lots of inactive, dead looking communities is off-putting. I know that I certainly don’t feel encouraged to post in them. I worry this might have a similar effect on other users too.
I do understand that c/programming is deemed as something of a catch-all community, and so anyone could post there rather than the niche communities, but I’m not sure that this is totally obvious to everyone.
Personally, I feel we should purge all the tiny communities that have no posts (or just a single blog post, for example) and encourage people to post in c/programming. Then, new communities can be made when a particular topic becomes large enough to warrant divergence, either because it’s clearly a subject of interest to many users or because it ends up dominating c/programming. c/rust is an example of such a community, as is c/programmerhumor.
I am nobody here, and I was not asked for my opinion, but I just wonder if this topic has been thought about much? I really want this place to thrive. Do any other users here have an opinion? What do the instance admins think?
I think the better option rather than condense things into less communities is to crosspost things between the larger communities and the smaller communities and make the larger communities more apparent to funnel people into them
We tried the system with people interested in running it with the request system, it didnt work and people didnt actually boost things
Mac is my posting account. I can start crossposting a bunch of stuff I post on it into the general communities if the specific things have less than 100 active users and do some more discussion posts
May I ask, why do you think that is the better option? I understand people didn’t boost things when they were requesting communities, but are they boosting now?
I’m not certain that cross-posting a bunch of stuff and dumping project newsfeeds into communities is going to kickstart them much. I don’t think that can work with you doing it alone across so many communities. You need someone who is really keen on growing the community to be doing it, and if that someone isn’t around - I’d argue the community may not need to exist (until someone does arrive and wants to do that).
Again, this is your instance and it’s not my business how you run it, so feel free to tell me to mind my own business.
Growth over time and SEO
It gets a bunch of activity in the larger community while letting the smaller communities grow. People havent been crossposting currently so it hasnt been happening but I can encourage it more
I mean we are a link aggregator. It aggregates links into the communities for people to view. Its been working so far and ive managed to boost a bunch of communities to have a larger amount of active users/month (the last community on page 1 now has 42 users/month rather than before it was 10 users/month at the end of page 1
Okay, well if you are confident it’s working, then great. Presumably then, you don’t see that there are any issues with over-dilution?
Yeah no issues as long as theres spots for people to feel comfortable posting in and interacting in regardless of activity elsewhere (which are c/programming and c/no_stupid_questions) and which is then supported by the crossposts
Ill try to do a better onboarding system to guide people that way
Ill ramp up my posting speed, been doing some more setup for things in the admin team for the past bit as well as switching which rss reader I use. Expect more activity in the instance the next week
Yeah, I just want to echo the growth over time comment. It’s still (relatively) early days of the Fediverse and Lemmy, and we’re still on the shallow part of the exponential growth graph. I mod the MAUI Community, which was created shortly before Xmas, and I made some announcements then (like on Mastodon, Daily Dew Drop, etc.) and some people joined then. But then I’ve also mentioned it again on a few other occasions since when it seemed appropriate (like the other day when I saw a notable dev still posting on Reddit), and each time I do it gains another subscriber or two. We just need to keep advocating each time there’s an opportunity. We’ve built it, and now we just need to wait for them to come. :-) And it’s been worthwhile, because when I have an issue I always post both here and on Mastodon, and sometimes I get a solution from Mastodon, but another time I got my solution from someone here (i.e. no-one from Mastodon responded, but someone here did, and the solution worked!). And of course, like Reddit, solutions posted here are easier to find than those posted on Mastodon. I think it’s great and just needs some time to grow (as people learn how the Fediverse works and what all the available services are, such as Lemmy instead of Reddit).
Do sites even index Lemmy in SEO? I haven’t found a case where a Google search yields a Lemmy thread organically, like it does with Reddit.
Yeah, we just have less content to pull from so people running into it on google happens less often
As a quick example of a community if you search up Concatenative Programming and scroll down a bit youll see programming.dev