Mobile Suit Gundam

Hey there, I've gone through a similar problem as @[email protected] mentioned.

I've run the LightNovel community on the .ml instance, which was basically dead, and for a year, it was for the most part just me posting each and every week into the void about what I've read and me trying to drum up support for it over on Reddit. During this time I've got told a few times that I should migrate to a different instance since this was a bad place on .ml but, you know, I've invested time into that community, and there were a few people every now and then that I didn't want to lose. But after thinking about it for a long while, I decided to migrate to [email protected] where the reception was a lot better by comparison. We're not exactly exploding in popularity or anything but at least there I feel like part of the group and not some outcast who dared to crash the party. If I needed help I got users reach out to me offering it. A very special thanks to [@I2jgwh0hYtxrCZQ @lemmy.sdf.org](https://lemmy.sdf.org/u/I2jgwh0hYtxrCZQ and @[email protected] who really got out of their way to help me time and again. Trust me, when coming from a dead community on an instance that doesn't want you that a huge thing.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that I think moving communities can be a great decision and that it's important to move somewhere where the community can belong. I can't speak for @[email protected] but I guess that GunPla is something that wouldn't be misplace on ani.social.

Next is about modding. Let me tell you that in almost a year so far there hasn't been a single instance where I had to mod anything. One time someone posted a Chinese or Korean light novel and I pointed that out that this is for Japanese light novels only but looking back on it now I feel like that was an clear error on my part. If I had just done nothing it would have been better and might have grown the community instead of pushing someone away. I don't expect that a GunPla community would explode to such popularity that it would take much work to mod it.

The other side is the content. I don't see this as mod work necessarily but just having a community existing doesn't mean that people will come and fill it up with content. For the most part it will be up to you to fill it up and make it someplace users might be interested to visit. That's where I'm struggling with the most to be honest. I tried to speed things up with several community building hacks like a discord server and hosting a Minecraft instance but nothing really took off. I think just posting content is the best way to go. I'm not versed enough into GunPla to know how much news/content/discussion there is. It's something you'll have to decide on your own if you're willing to invest that much time into it. Until there's some resonance it will feel very soul crushing, I can tell you that much.

Whatever you decide to do with your community, feel free to hit me up if you have any question. Best of luck.