This thread is great for getting ideas on how to get some content in the community I have.

Tip for those creating new communities: don't slam your fresh community with loads of new posts all at once. Pace yourselves. Create 2 or 3 new posts initially. Then over the next day pop a new post every few hours.

The net result is the same (content!), but you greatly reduce the risk of people blocking your community. I look a lot in local, sorting by new. And when my feed is deluged by posts for the same brand new community, I tend to block that community because it's smells like spam. And I'm probably not alone in doing this.

I understand the desire to automate this sort of thing and I can understand the utility at first but I think we should absolutely be afraid of that in long term use. Instead I think people should use the built in cross posting function to link conversations from different communities. I think this is a great way to build slow diffusion of communities into the fediverse.

See my post here for an example: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/217550

I joined the Glasgow community. I'm the only subscriber there!

so true : when i tried mastodon, the first feature i enjoyed was the local feed : it just give you the feeling you don't go to an empty place

Been trying to get Japanese Metal started and got in touch with some mods from other communities regarding crosslinking in the sidebar, which some of them did (some didn't even reply).

Apart from that, I've been posting stuff from time to time, but only once has someone else made a posting. I don't feel a call to action would help a lot. Even though the number of subscribers has gone up, the community is more or less inactive, except for when I post something myself, but seeing all the content there coming from the mod isn't very encouraging.

Maybe Lemmy still has too small a user base, or the community's visibility is bad -- which wouldn't surprise me, with Beehaw still defederated and lemmy.world having issues all the time.

I don't want to advertise in other communities, either. Even though it'd not be actual "headhunting", I feel it's bad manners.

Any idea what else I could try?

I started https://kbin.social/m/BostonTerrier and I'm trying to post multiple times a week, but it's difficult sort of throwing things into the void. Plus, I only have two dogs!

That is true.

I've created a new community /c/housing_bubble_2. How do I get it featured on newcommunities?

Crossposting is also a good way to start. For example there is community like [email protected] or [email protected] that focus on specific part of France. They have almost no original content but someone interested on Lyon's local story may not be subscribe to all the community about tourist, politic, urbanism, activism, fun stories and so on that publish stories about this place.

Worth mentioning that if you have put in the work to have lots of posts, it might still show as very few, maybe 0–1 posts to people if they are viewing the community from another instance. Posts from other instances do not federate over to yours unless someone on your instance subscribed to it. And if all the users subscribing on your instance unsubscribe, then you will not get any more posts from it federating over until someone subscribes again. So a community that follows this advice can appear as if they did not put in the work when they really did. To get around this problem, view the community from the instance it is hosted on (e.g. view [email protected] on lemmy.zip, not through lemmy.world/c/[email protected]).

How do you create a community? I dont even have the option.

Thanks. I'll try to kickstart mine once I have some free time.