Growing a community where the content already exists seems easier than coming up with content from scratch, unsurprisingly. I’ve started 3 Lemmy communities for comics and they keep growing because I post old comics every day. Each one has enough of a backlog that I’m not going to run out any time soon (One of them has ~50 years of backlog 😮)

!smbc@midwest.social

!peanuts@midwest.social

!oglaf@midwest.social

I think it also helps that it’s not just a simple RSS feed, which already existed for SMBC. Posting old comics along with new comics, but then going through the effort of formatting the posts nicely seems to help a lot. I’m also considering writing a script that automatically handles some of the upstream oddities, like some sites storing pictures as gifs that some apps display as movies instead of images, making it hard to zoom and whatnot.

!loops@midwest.social is growing steadily. Getting a decent number of good comments, but I’m also hoping for more contributors. It might just be too early yet, since Loops has a small enough amount of content that one person (i.e. me) can catch up on everything posted since I last looked and repost it to Lemmy.

What’s kind of interesting is that I’ve eschewed Loops-like social media until now, so I understand why people might not like it joining the Fediverse. I’m hoping that promoting it though will help the Fediverse as a whole grow. Right now it’s not federated, and there’s not even source code published anywhere, but it’s made by the guy behind Pixelfed and he’s said both of those will happen, so I don’t have any doubts.

!mealtimevideos@lemmy.cafe and !documentaries@lemmy.cafe had a very successful migration from Lemmy.world, and both seem to have actually gained more active users than before, which I attribute to Lemmy.cafe participating in Lemmy-federate, as well as the announcement in the new communities sub-lem. All of the big posters keeping mealtime alive transferred over as well, so overall extremely pleased! ^^

A bit busy with life now, so not as active as I used to be. Mostly focused on !showsandmovies@lemm.ee, activity is stable

Trying to populate !collapse@sopuli.xyz and !privacy@programming.dev

The good news is that some posters started to posting there after a while.

I’m just the janitor. I don’t mind. I only ever have issues to resolve in !3dprinting@lemmy.world. The flop of !unfinishedprojects@lemmy.world after people seemed enthusiastic was a bit of a bummer. I’m not sure if my posts intimidated, or my config of the community failed to resonate, or maybe it is just me. !wotd@lemmy.world is basically me taking notes to expand my vocabulary and posting those here.

For me, Lemmy can’t be a project I commit to like those of you that really build the community super actively. I love y’all for doing that. I need the social community part for my own stability, and try to contribute something meaningful when it seems appropriate.

I do find it interesting how Lemmy has evolved over the last 6 months or so. The demographic has shifted somewhat, gauging by how people grasp and respond to my more abstracted thoughts. There seems to have been an influx of a younger audience especially from shitjustworks. It could be that they were always here but not actively engaging or in ways that I encounter.

I’m also more aware of the delay of the bot transporters mechanism between instances and how it can delay interactions between instances.

I have started posting pretty much daily again on !thrashmetal@lemmy.world, now have a regular poster other than myself. Occasionally there is another user that drops by every once in a while and unloads a bunch of content which is nice. I appreciate the effort those users go to. Very slow growth with that community, though it is fairly niche.

!leagueoflegends@lemmy.world isn’t in great shape. I keep it updated with the important news, but Reddit just has a monopoly.

!otomegames@ani.social has now acquired an icon that fits in with the rest of the instance—it’s an anime picture! Still have to get going on the backup instance.

The weekly What are you playing posts tend to get at least some engagement nowadays.

I fixed up the OtomeGamesBot to post them for me, which I correctly marked as a bot account.

One upvote and nothing else.

I also recall it being possible to prevent bot posts from being shown to you. (Settings > uncheck Show Bot Accounts)

I’ll let the bot post again two more weeks, and if the posts continue getting less engagement than I’m used to seeing I’ll probably need to go back to posting them on my account instead.