They're not being flippant. They want you to grow the community. They want to see it too. We're all here because we want to see Lemmy grow.

We're willing to help as much as we can. I'm posting way more than I would normally. In fact I usually only lurk. But I want to get content here. So if you make a community I'll post to it. As much as I can.

It really depends on the type of community. I created a few a missed from Reddit and honestly the screenshot/photo based communities are piss easy to start. !badrealestate for example is 3 weeks old with 48 posts and 3.6k subscribers. I just posted every day for a few weeks, now other people are posting and I contribute a couple of times a week.

On the other hand !tennis_fans and !downtherabbithole are much harder to get going because they require very regular or in depth text posts. Those two have less than 200 subscribers between them.

What I find really annoying is when people criticise posts on the communities I’ve created, when they haven’t contributed at all. People want more communities, people want more content. Don’t be a dick and then criticise the content that someone has put their time and effort into sharing with you for your enjoyment! Anyway, rant over.

If anyone’s browsing this thread and looking for more (active) communities to join, there’s also !DontYouKnowWhoIAm !clevercombacks !murderedbywords and !confidently_incorrect

Yeah, bothered me during the protests to see people downplaying the importance of mods from those who were upset about their favorite sub being shut down. It's a thankless job that takes lot of building to get started and exposure to bunch of crap to keep the place nice for its users.

Anyway, I just wanted to give an alternate viewpoint to those which are suggesting that people became mods as a power trip or whatever. That’s certainly not the case for me - ideally, I don’t even particularly want to be a mod, but I did want the communities to have a foothold for people arriving to Lemmy with no idea what to expect.

There's a big difference between creating 2 communities and creating 20.

As awkward as it may feel, but if you are the only person creating content, then there IS content at least. It doesn't make sense to do nothing and just hope that other people will eventually fill the void, as random visitors will take one look at the community and think "eh, it's empty, no use in staying here" and just move on. Someone has to make the first step.

Of course a little bit of advertisement can't hurt as well, but content comes first.

Do it, the promote your community on !newcommunities@lemmy.world

There are usually people there who will help you, at least upvoting and commenting

What community are you planning to post to?

Make sure you go to each of the major lemmy instances and and subscribe, search, or ensure your community is federated for those instances all feed.

Then just post, and try to spark interest and discussion, maybe once or twice a week, as a form of advertising your community exists and is a place for people interested in what have you

There is a sub on reddit where for ~6 months 95% of the content was me, bunch of links staggered weekly. Then suddenly it picked up steam because somewhere off-reddit someone found it and dragged a whole bunch people along.

But if i hadn't been posting, then that wouldn't have happened.

It's possible your posts could get boosted by new/all sorters and make it to hot/all even with no subscribers, but I would recommend trying to advertise the community and get subs first to improve your odds of growing your audience

I created a community on Lemmy.world named after my own username just to test things and post random shit... A lot of it gets upvoted so people are definitely seeing it but I don't think I've got any subscribers on that one...

I also had a night where I was pretty tipsy early on in my Lemmy days where I created a number of other communities... Only one or two have any subscribers and I'm usually still the .ain one who generates content.

Good. The last thing I want in this place to turn into a clone of reddit.

honestly even if .world had 100% uptime i'd still recommend spreading out to smaller instances. it's a single point of failure for the entire network (or at least the parts of the network as seen by lemmy/kbin). bus factor and all

i personally hope that over time as the tooling improves (and as "turnkey" hosters like masto.host adopt lemmy), more topic-specific instances get started up. think of startrek.website or programming.dev or slrpnk or rblind or literature.cafe or all the country instances. and general purpose instances like .world and lemm.ee and sijw and what have you can be for smaller communities that don't have the resources, or they can be used as "account holder" instances that have people but "outsource" the communities to their own respective instances to keep their own costs down.

everyone piling up on .world is hurting the entire network. (even worse when they create communities and those communities also pile up on .world) and it's sad to see the .world admins refuse to acknowledge this and handwave it behind "well we're still smaller than mastodon.social /shrug" (and yes i have complaints about eugen's handling of mastodon.social/.online too)