At this point, we’re beyond the big wave of new users in early- to mid-June with the protests against Reddit’s API policies. (I was one of them!). There was lots of enthusiasm, a bunch of new communities, and lots of posts.
But it seems like a lot of the activity is dying down. How are you (and your communities) doing? How have you been keeping your communities active?
It’s mostly me posting in [email protected], with votes on the posts being either on the cusp of or just barely into double digits for a 400-ish subscriber community. The rough part is that while the number of subscribers continues to grow, the number of people posting and commenting has not. I exchange at most 1 comment or so from time to time with 1 other user.
The slow but steady subscriber count growth keeps me from giving up and stopping, but I wonder when I’ll start to see engagement from more than just me. I’m thinking of trying to encourage more low-effort engagement, like [DISC] posts where people can comment with links to doujinshi with related content, but haven’t committed to it yet.
Anecdotally, growing and maintaining a hentai-oriented community feels pretty challenging. The instance as a whole is generally IRL-oriented, looking at Local+Active (which isn’t a bad thing, esp. w/ the OC posters!). Other hentai posters have either left in search of or been banned for posting content they’d ordinarily post elsewhere. While the reasons are understandable, I think it creates some barriers to visibility and posting in hentai communities.
EDIT: The UX around GIF/Video posting also seems to suck enough for me to not post any to avoid people just seeing still frames instead of an animation, but that’s seemingly more of a Lemmy problem than anything to do w/ this specific instance.
Yup! That describes my experiences with [email protected] . And I try to post to other communities that I want to see active but it’s hella slow going.
I tried to enable the horny posters by writing post titles as questions, which usually works great on reddit. The most engagement I get on here is “you didn’t include source on this one” 😅
Yeah, that sounds about right. FWIW the original paizuri sub (which I don’t moderate) barely has any comments even on its biggest posts in the past year, so it’s not like I’m doing much worse. 😋
I just want other people to post so I can add to my own collection. For now, I’m just rediscovering things I’ve downloaded or artists I should be following, but it’d be better to get from others too.
It’s starting to get tough. I see that across most of the communities except for a select few. A few posters keeping communities alive with mostly just upvotes/downvotes as engagement. It’s a difficult role to have, especially long-term.
The reality is probably that the group that is here right now is probably the group for a while. On one hand, it’s cool that we don’t get instantly downvoted to -1 within seconds, it also means that your posts don’t get upvoted to the thousands or have 100 comments. I personally feel that there is a point of critical mass where this instance just takes off, due to some random event but sometimes I wonder - do I really want that? All those people bring drama, reposts, bots, DMCA, and low-budget content. It does bring OC, creativity, and variety, which is really missing at times.
Anyway, to your question:
I tried a banner contest once, it just sat there with mostly no response - https://lemmynsfw.com/post/1290450
I did a poll once, I got some good feedback using pictures as options - https://lemmynsfw.com/post/887466
I think starting with low effort engagement is a good segue to better engagement. Ask questions, make a poll, make a tournament of pictures, etc. Go back to how large forums used to do it. I also believe that as folks get used to each other it will be come more engaging. It takes time. Also, for your video question, .webp is king at the moment. See here - https://lemmynsfw.com/post/884574
I totally agree that hitting critical mass comes with some downsides. I’m hoping that I’ll be a little insulated from that if it happens since I try to be more active on smaller communities, but there’s always some bleed over.
Thanks for the tip w/ video too! Having to convert is a mild pain, but at least I’ve got the option and can script away some of the trouble. It worked fine on the website (mobile and desktop) but seems to fail to load entirely with the Eternity for Lemmy app for Android. I’m not sure how many people use that anyway. Maybe the upvotes will tell.
EDIT: Seems like the upstream Lemmy repo merged a fix for the way it handles webm files.