I’ve discovered Lemmy quite recently and I’m still learning how it works. One of the things I don’t get is how small communities can become known? On the main page I can only see communities that I’ve already subscribed to. I can also see popular posts on this instance. But how post in a community can become popular if no one has already joined it?
- Put up genuinely interesting stuff on the community, at least 1-2 times per day so it has a little flow of activity.
- Once there are a screen’s full of posts or so, post the new community on !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca. People will see the thing and subscribe to it from everywhere (if they are interested) and it will get federated to most of the main servers.
- As the activity continues, people may decide to post stuff of their own there, and other people will run across it either from the “local all” feed of your instance or from the “global all” feed somewhere else. They may subscribe to it, they may happen to see a cross-post from someplace they are subscribed to, but however it works out there will grow a steady flow of subscribers, if people are interested in it.
The sort of filtering aspect where not every new community will automatically get its posts thrown into every single person’s feed every day, is a feature not a bug. The steps above are enough to get it popular if people are into it, but also limiting enough that it won’t get publicized above its organic popularity level and start spamming everyone’s feed.
- Have an interesting topic
- Create a community
- Post some interesting stuff
- Federate with other servers
- Keep posting and engage
make sure to submit your community on https://lemmy-federate.com/
I’m not sure this is actually necessary. I found that a single post of a moderately-interesting community to !newcommunities@lemmy.world wound up federating my stuff to all the main instances instantly.
I get the concept, and maybe depending on the details of the network it might be needed (it might be a good approach on Mastodon for example, which has a much harder chicken-and-egg problem in terms of getting your stuff federated). I’m not sure it’s doing any active harm or anything. But at the same time I do feel like importing this kind of “not enough people are seeing my stuff how can I make sure as many people as possible see my stuff” tools over from the SEO marketer’s toolkit might be a bad habit or pattern to get into.
I crosspost with popular communities. For example !peertube@lemmy.world is an awesome place to find federated videos from across the fediverse ;)
Also become the change you want to see. Post comment ect… Its a community, have fun with others that enjoy the same stuff you do.
Also if you hang out in New, you eventually see things you like and then subscribe.
