Gaming, news, tech, general literature. All of these are somewhat thriving, with a steady influx of posts and comments. At the same time, the userbase is sorely lacking for more niche communities. In my case it’d be stuff like poetry, yoga, religion, linguistics, meditation. Or many other communities I’d doubt they’d form a larger userbase here, at least to the degree that it’d foster good discussions. Communities where there are a larger amount of “normal people”, that are not tech-aware, and who have no interest in migrating off centralized corporate solutions. That just want a large space to discuss what they’re interested in.
This for me at least, makes it hard to completely leave reddit (or even Facebook and their groups!). Do you think the fediverse will ever reach the point where this would become a non-issue?
Same. I think we need some way to coordinate the initial burst of content for some of the smaller subs. I hate to say it, but maybe we need to assign “homework” - Request (not require) new subscribers to contribute unique stories or info relevant to the mag/comm on some type of schedule.
Something like:
"As we try to grow this new community, we want to hear from you. We’re asking (not requiring) all new subscribers to start a new post within their first week covering some aspect of the topic they find personally interesting or that they feel could help others. Just add “(1P)” to the title of the post. It doesn’t matter if it’s something you said elsewhere, if you’re new to the entire topic and just want to post a bunch of questions, you have a funny story to tell, or have a super niche specialty.
Also, we should consider having more moderator-level users in subs to reduce the burden of moderation. It’s more daunting if you’re asked to be one of 3 mods than it is to be one of 15. We should also look into incentivizing moderation duties, but there’s probably a much longer discussion to be had about that.
This sounds like a great tradition to encourage and support. On Reddit I was pretty danged chatty & responsive, but almost never started my own post. Maybe at most once a year. I hereby commit to upping my participation game to include some actual posts to some of the quiet magazines I’ve subbed to. Thanks for the push.
And YOUR exuberance has inspired me to commit to upping my post game. I was never a big poster on Reddit, but mostly because I just didn’t want to deal with the contrarian and amateur professionals fallout. It might be best to focus on the niche communities, since that’s where the real valuable stuff exists on Reddit.
Good luck out there!