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?

  • @show_me_what_you_got_grrlEnglish
    6•10 months ago

    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

    • KeralewdMEnglish
      3•10 months ago

      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.