I don't like "big" instances, since they tend to quickly walk back on their promised goals once they no longer can manage their size. So when I joined Lemmy it was on a smaller now defunct vlemmy.net instance. The idea of operating and moderating the community was not that appealing, but it was a way to promote the instance, so I started !globalnews@vlemmy.net and !databreaches@vlemmy.net. It was a slow start, but they grew over time, reaching 1000/400 subscribers respectively and then the admin killed the instance and vanished. That was a lesson.

After that, I joined lemmy.zip, it was tiny then, but it had a lot of things going for it, multiple admins, multiple communication channels, transparent finances and good base rules. What it lacked was content. So I had to decide if it was worth my time to start over by creating another community and help it grow. I re-started !globalnews@lemmy.zip and !databreaches@lemmy.zip and just started posting without any expectations. It was an outlet to share what I found interesting or what caught my eye. Eventually, people started commenting, and organic discussions started happening. I expanded the number of communities I moderate now, but the principles are the same. No expectations.

So the reason for all this backstory is that I stay motived by believing in the project and wanting to help good instances to grow. If not for Lemmy I wouldn't be posting anywhere else, never moderated on Reddit, never even posted on Reddit, was a habitual lurker there.

Just find topics you are interested in, maybe set up an RSS client and share the content that you find interesting yourself.

It's never bothered me - I talk to myself a lot anyway.

It's a little disconcerting when I post stuff and people (I assume) down vote it because they can't be bothered to read past the headline.

I posted a video to an almost dead Tron community with Joseph Kosinski talking about Tron Legacy being released in 4K.

But, again, I assume, because the video thumbnail and description was all about Top Gun Maverick...⬇️👇⬇️👇⬇️

I'm kind of giving up. When I came over during the Reddit APIpocolypse, I tried to post as much as I could. My posts here don't get much engagement, and only seem to reach a small audience, so it doesn't feel like it's worth the effort.

I still try to post and comment, but it feels like a slog sometimes.

I haven't been posting / commenting as much recently because I've been busy with life stuff, but I do like seeing the posts (ex. I enjoy seeing the Lego posts). It would be nice to have more comments, but otherwise I usually upvote or save the post

One thing I've noticed is that even on Reddit, there are more posts with lots of upvotes and no comments. I'm not sure why that is

I'm planning to get posting again, but what I've found is that a lot of posts in the niche communities didn't go anywhere. Then every now and then a post takes off and a lot of people see it.

Best is when other people start posting too (ex. !publichealth@mander.xyz ). I guess it takes time for an active contributor with similar interests to find the community, since others might not encounter enough content outside of Lemmy to post them

I shout into it more and hope that one day the void will answer back. It works occasionally. For example, I moderate a T-Mobile US community and started it off at zero and it's got over 200 subscribers now. Most posts still don't get comments, but there are some that do, and sometimes conversation even occurs or is beginning to anyway.

I do this for a few sublemmys like !nasa@lemmy.world and !esa@feddit.nl. I view it as keeping communities on "life support" until Lemmy grows a bit more.

One of the best practices I can think of is to cross-post a post with text in the body (important) from a small sublemmy to a large sublemmy. This creates a link to the original post on the smaller community, and gives it some visibility.

Sometimes I question the fact that some communities might be too niche, but even on something as generic as !movies@lemm.ee there aren't that many people wanting to talk about movies

Part of the problem may be lack of tagging and filtering tools.

For example:

I'm not interested in memes so if a community is largely filled with them, my only way to avoid them may be to block the community. This includes communities that I might otherwise subscribe to, or want to engage with.

This is also tied into community fragmentation, community discoverability, and feeling the need to browse All to see anything. I don't know how widespread my issue is, but I have seen others mentioning having extensive block lists of communities.

I don't mind. We're still early adopters here really. I see it as slowly building a stronger place for people to find in future exoduses.

I started moderating !animation@lemm.ee about two weeks ago. I don't feel demotivated so far because it's still early days and I think it's a fairly niche topic. Especially among Lemmy's somewhat older userbase. On top of that the subscriber count has more than tripled during that time so I'm pretty happy with that. The one thing that frustrates me are the occasional random downvotes. I'm certain most of them are just by people not subscribed. I kind of wish there was a way to set it up so only subscribers to the community could downvote.

The 1 post that got a huge amount of traction and a lot of fun conversation (even though some of it was off topic) was a discussion question in the form of a meme. I wanted to try it out because on the ALL feed, the majority of the most popular posts are memes. It's not something I want to do too often because I don't want that to be the focus, but I'll probably do it from time to time in the hopes of getting more people engaged. And maybe pull some more subscribers.

I don't mind the slower nature of lemmy. I like how quiet it is compared to the karma farming spam bot hell reddit was.

Ah, I really enjoyed interestingasfuck at the other place, I posted one just now, I'd like to see that community succeed.