While I agree on every community needing at least a little content, I'm not sure I agree on the second point: if this place had a lot more communities, even with two active people each, it would also attract more users, or at least it would make me visit the site more and would have reduced the time I spent indecisive on signing up.

A community isn't just a bunch of content but also a possibility for it. It's the reassurance that there is at least another person on this site who shares your interest. It's somerhing that makes it more attractive not to jump from site to site for each different interest. Those who create them are doing their part by being available as moderators, which is already something that should not be taken for granted.

I have plenty of ridiculously niche communities I'd like to see that would be lucky to get 3 members each, from lichens to cron diet (longevity diet with a little less calories than mantainance and very micronutrient dense) and scientific (or just fanboy like and excited sometimes, waterhomies style) discussion of nutraceuticals (such as garlic and ginger and turmeric) and of mitochondria and of microbiome, to specific anime/manga fans, to animal movements (crawling in various ways as a sport), and I could go on, but I don't create them because I don't want to mod them since my relationship with tech makes me go through unpredictable offline phases

I wonder if years of fleeing the front page to niche subs conditioned us all to try and make niche subs here when we should just be shooting the breeze right here on front street.

It feels so alien to actually put a run on sentence idea out and not parrot a meme.

That said I made some shit posts on one of the nichest of niche communities.

What is hard too, is if all the posts to get things started are the mods or creator, the same ghost town might occur. It’s hard to tell or know what will be interesting to get people talking so to speak. Some should also be put on the subscribers as well who also have an interest. It’s a double edge sword sometimes.

I wish more people understood this concept in general. Whether it be making communities on a network like this, making discord servers, or even starting a small business -- many times my friends and acquaintances have tried to create something that relies on people to keep it alive, but give no one a reason to want to engage with their platform/service/etc, expecting there to be a flood of people out of nowhere that will cause the system to support itself.

Good talk, needs more exposure.

Also to everyone creating a community, it takes time. Don't get too discouraged if uptake is slow!

Another thought: making a community can also be a nice structured incentive to check in on your hobby regularly. I like looking for videos or articles to link to for my yugioh community even though there's not many people subscribed - it gives me an opportunity to interact with and think about the game in different ways than I normally do.

I only have so many interesting things to say. I don't really want to post for the sake of generating content, so making 5-10 posts right off the bat seems like the wrong way to go about it. I think it'd be better to make one post a day or one every other day or so that anyone who comes in can see that it's recently active.

An idea for people like me that still use reddit alongside lemmy, if you make a post on lemmy, post the lemmy link to the corresponding subreddit. That way if the post gets traction on reddit, all the clicks are leading them to the lemmy post

If you want to crosspost content from reddit automatically use: https://github.com/driccio98/BotIt,
It's intended for links and I wouldn't encourage using it for anything else cause you know, stealing content from others is not good.
But if you need a link aggregator for your community this might do it.

I'm trying to get into the habit of posting everyday, I fell out of it on reddit because it grew so big and would often go nowhere.

Mods rejecting posts willy-nilly, users who sit on /new thinking they can be the gatekeeper, shadowbanning of a post without being informed. It's going to take some time to get used to posting more.

I make an effort to comment on interesting posts or links I appreciate! But I haven't had much in terms of inspiration to post (might be because I don't have reliable desktop access rn).

Great idea, I posted my own photography work here and people joined afterwards. https://lemmy.world/c/macrophotography

Sounds like something AI would be good at.

made several for my own interests. a few are just me. a few have thousands of subs. who knew?

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 made [email protected] and I've been thinking about posting once a day so that I don't exhaust my content to post, but is that enough? Should I try to make a couple posts a day?

r/vans is in the top 5% of subreddit size. I've got one subscriber other than myself! Haha

What might be a good idea is to spend a bit of time each week gathering content and then using https://github.com/RikudouSage/LemmySchedule to spread out the posting throughout the week. Then you can comment on it as it shows up on your feed.

ok, i'll post every couple of days.

Would you mind if I pin this post? I feel like it will be helpful if people can see this post the second they enter this community, to help with the 0-1 post problem

There's a reason I've been posting every Hermitcraft video to /c/Hermitcraft. It needs content or its just... Dead

I’ve been doing just that. If you’re a fan of The Office, get on over to m/DunderMifflin. Although I’ve never been a fan of the name. It’d be better if it was m/PaperGreat. Where Great Paper is our Passion.

and once you get a few regular posters, ask if they'd mind helping with modding. I'm guilty of skipping the asking part now and then. going on a road trip etc.