I’m a moderator of a smaller community. I’m posting quality content multiple times a day, and I posted about it in New Communities. The number of subscribers is low but it’s growing steadily.
Could you please give me some advice on growing this community? I don’t want to spam/flood or come off as rude or weird, but I really believe in it and think it would be useful to many people.
I think it just takes time. I’m also posting to a community that currently has 7 subscribers (and I think that includes me, haha) but I enjoy posting there since I care about the topic. Growth will come naturally, but I mostly care about exchanging ideas and just general conversation with other fans.
You need to get at least one user on another instance to sub to your community manually. Before you do that, you will only be discoverable by users on the local instance. Once you get that first user, posts in your community will start appearing in “all” on that other instance.
After you get a sub from some other instance, regular posting will help users find you by just seeing posts from your community on their instance, and they can easily click the community name and sub to it.
Aside from this fediverse-specific quirk, @thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee already posted some good tips.
- Work it into the conversation when you’re talking to people elsewhere (I don’t mod any communities but am interested in seeing them grow and this has been the #1 successful tactic)
- Don’t be weird about mentioning it in general. For example, why does this post not say what your community is or have a link for people to follow?
- Don’t just post links that people can click on, think “huh” and then move on. Post questions or other interactive things to draw out lurkers.
- Team up with mods of related communities to maintain a list of “neighbours” that you all pin to make it easy for your users to find more stuff they’re interested in.
- Make sure to respond to anyone who does happen to wander in and leave a post or comment, don’t leave them hanging
- Advertise it on your other social media since presumably you’re hanging around people with the same interests
Constant work. Such online communities have an exponential growth pattern. So you probably have a certain amount of time after which you double.
This is obviously very apparent when you have 10k subs, and on the next day it is 10,1k. But when you are at 10 subs it can take days for the next to arrive.
Just go on posting and the thing will start to take off. If you stop, or other active members stop the community might die.
