Im wondering what ways people advertise/grow their lemmy instances. I recently just created mine and would like to put it out there as one of the options. How did you discover your instance and what drew you to it?
I think you have a better chance if your instance focuses on a topic instead of being general purpose. That’s the reason I chose programming.dev. All communities there are related to programming so when I sort by “local” I see something interesting even though I haven’t subscribed to that community. And that increases my interaction with those communities.
Be also careful with potential users being cautious about you going out of business overnight. Vlemmy.net members had that happen to them last week.
Well my vps is already paid for about 11 months in advanced now so no problems there. And im happy to keep it going if people find use in my server.
I would check you TOS with the VPS provider if you get too much traffic or the wrong type of traffic they may terminate your service.
I have 32tb/month so i think ill be ok 😅
That’s very good, but what I’m saying is that people are getting cautious nowadays to make sure that their accounts can survive long term. I hope you’ll be well as long as possible, but what happens if something happens to you tomorrow? Who would take care of the servers? Do you have a redundancy plan? The success of LW as the main Lemmy instance is because the admins are experienced, and are a team. Some other instances are managed by non profits or long established groups. That can be a differentiator for choices.
Well i dont have any non profit backing but as far as redundancy is concerned ive got that covered. But yeah i see your point and how it would affect user choice and confidence.
When I speak about redundancy, I speak about sysadmins as much as disk redundancy. Taking my hypothetical scenario, something happens to you, you are in the coma, there is a security breach (like the one from a few days back), is there someone to take care of it? I know it might be unlikely but as I said, the Vlemmy thing was very low probability and still happened
If i were to die today my instance would still continue. If both me and the other admin were to die at the same time then everyone is just shit outta luck at that point
So that’s the good thing, you have another admin (I don’t think you mentioned it at any point earlier, if you did, sorry I missed it), which is a good thing! You should probably insist on that when you promote your community
The Mastodon Covenant is for exactly this problem (as well as a baseline level of moderation).
Honestly your best method is going to be to make a new thread like once a week, in one of the major Lemmy-focused forums, until your userbase hits a figure you like.
It’s going to be more effective than any other method by far, I think, as you’re most likely to catch people right at that point where they’re thinking “I want to experience a smaller Instance…”
Then they’re gonna make an alt there, and if they like it, the alt will become the main.
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Going a little bit different direction than some of the other responses, I feel like hash-tagging (wait that’s called something else now…?) content is important in helping people to find you in searching. And I’m thinking of search as a particularly important function as platforms like this are growing.
I see posts that are heavily (15 or more) tagged… that may not even qualify as “heavily” out here in the fediverse, just something new to me.
Been thinking about this a little bit and how I can personally lean into it versus my own insecurities. So this is a way for me to exercise self-promotion.
I think that getting your instance in some of the lists going around would be a good idea, I have accounts on a few instances and most of them I have discovered through any of the lists listed on join-lemmy.org/instances
A big problem is that the awesome lemmy lost doesn’t seem to be updated anymore
I just liked the name of sh.itjust.works tbh and the lemmy.world one was overloaded
your username is from another planet :D
:)-
Have some clarity around who you are, what you care about, why you’re doing this, the sort of things you want to achieve with the instance, what you want to prevent, what your values are especially around moderation etc.
Also having redundancies in place or at least someone else rubbing the insurance with you is attractive.
Good luck!!
