I’m the creator of kbin.social/m/bestof. I have been ‘advertising’ the subreddit of it to start getting traction. Despite all my efforts, I’m still the only contributor to my community. How do communities entice their subscribers to post content?
Hello there! Please edit your post title to include a question. In the meantime, i’ll try to extend this comment to help give some suggestions on growth. :)
edit: Alright, so. If you want your community to grow, it HAS to hit the front page. Post things that most people will like. This is what will get you up & running the fastest. Grab a top content from other platforms if you have to.
On lemmy.world, for instance, making a post with a catchy title on New Communities is a good way to get your community started. Find the counterpart on kBin or try posting it on the one we have here. You can also have it featured in bigger communities.
Always have a pinned post that your members can freely participate on. Explain to them what your goals and views are regarding that community, and what purpose the community is supposed to serve. You might find some people willing to help boost your community activity. If you can’t, then openly ask for help. You can’t have a community alone; it wouldn’t be a community.
Remember, you need content, quality or not, crosspost or not. It needs to be scrollable. While having said that, please don’t start out with scraper bots. Many people see it as a repulsive thing nowadays.
In general, provide content people want, let people know on appropriate forums, and wait. My subreddit took almost 10 years to get 15k subscribers and the first few it was maybe 5 people myself included that were contributing.
You don’t. You merely keep the community from dying by posting your own content periodically and you wait. You can’t control them though, and trying will piss them off.
Like hearding cats.
This is bad advice.
What makes you think so?
Because that’s already what everyone does. And just posting every once in a while and hoping it catches on, that doesn’t work for anyone, does it? That’s how a community dies, as a community with a single poster isn’t a community. They should keep posting to relevant spaces and look for people who might support them. Takes two to make three. Maybe grab some top posts to try to hit the front page. Post it in New Communities with catchy titles. etc. etc. There’s lots of things they could still be doing if they really want it to take off, haha. I didn’t make a single post on YSK besides the welcome post and some meta posts as needed, and was always clear from the start that I will let these spaces die if our first few members stopped posting.
So, be aware, you did happen to pick up two of the most critical infrastructure-related subs that can exist on a place like this, they were absolutely vital to get set up. It’s just a necessary service. You should remember though, pretty much nobody else gets that lucky with their communities.
You are extremely atypical.
deleted by creator
The nature of your sub also requires that viral Lemmy posts propagate in order to even be considered to belong, which might make it even more difficult to gain traction. I haven’t been around that long here but I’m guessing you only have one post…the 3 day poop post lol.
I’ll subscribe though!
I am currently using jerboa for lemmy, on an android tablet. When I tap on the link in your comment, I get prompted to declare which app should be used to open it.
That makes me immediately back out.
That’s a problem with jerboa though, there isn’t a good way to link anything for jerboa. I could be wrong but I’ve tried different ways and all of them don’t work (they either crash, open in a new tab you aren’t logged into, or don’t work at all).
How do I subscribe to your magazine from lemmy?
I could by searching for !BestOf@kbin.social. You should include that info in your posts
I’m on Jerboa, and I have not figured out how to adjust your link into something that Jerboa can find in search.
If it is just my impatience with the distributed nature of the fediverse, then that is on me…
E+: I hit up the “communities” search on my home instance web interface and there it was.
I find just searching BestOf and scrolling through the results is the easiest way on Jerboa. Doesn’t always work for new communities though. Hopefully something they’ll fix in future updates.
Damn communists
