From my experience and from what I'm seeing there are two ways of how people get on the platform in general:

• slowly, over time - this results from people getting to know the platform through various ways
• rapidly, which basically results from some fuckup of other players, and it has to be a pretty big fuckup cause the strength of the bonds that people developed with FB, TT and reddit and the established network effect is huge.

I try to grow my instance. Obviously I'm doing approach number one, cause we are not in the middle of any fuckup currently. And it's tedious. People just ignore you. Cause your communities are basically empty. But they won't grow without people. And it's a vicious circle. And so when I'm doing that I don't have time to create content on the other hand. But creating content when nobody is reading is also tedious. But without content people won't come here. Another vicious circle!

And of course, in my case I'm alone. But we could assume that there is more than one person, maybe there are 2 or 3 or more. They might still struggle with similar problem.

So there is option number two - wait for the next fuckup. But you have to be prepared. So try to build content. Without engagement obviously. Talk to an empty wall. Like many succesful content creators did in the beginning. And then fuckup happens. And when you suddenly have a wave of new users, they see that you at least try to make a good content. This content might attract the wave.

Idk, I'm just wondering how I should invest my time and energy. Maybe we need to be flexible. Maybe do a little bit of both right?

What do you think about it? How do you grow your communities? Especially in the beginning? There should be some 101 article on this with some list or something. Or even a lemmy community "growing_fedi_community"

One week is left to reddit IPO. Should we be prepared for increased discussion on the internet about social media and fediverse? It would be a good time for our instance promotion. Apparently WallStreetBets are preparing to short the reddit stock, they might be onto something. If they will be succesful I think fediverse will be mentioned.

On the other hand, I just went to WSB. Looks like they aren't really interested in fediverse. Almost no talk about it

it's about activitypub protocol itself calling our real host public key to validate http signature . Is that commonly known fact and can the fediverse be improved here?

If anyone has more cases would be nice to know. For example if I create account with tor but post not from tor? Or If I create account without tor but post with tor? etc

another case: [POST, Tor created account, normal browser, cleaned cookies, same PC, post created short after creating account]: not shadowbanned but can't post, getting error "Sorry, this post was removed by reddit filters"

UPDATE: So I think if you try to post on sub from account that was banned on sub, reddit tags the title, body and image and so next time no matter the account if you try post same content, it wont go through. That's what happened to me at least. I tweaked a title a bit, and trimmed the image and reddit finally accepted it.

Will be updating this maybe. I'm trying to post something to community I was banned from.

Reddit had a short outage (that's what you say it?) today. What came to my mind is we could use a script that checks if reddit has issues and if it has it could notify us through gmail or whatever and then we have we quickly make a twitter post with appropriate hashtags #redditdown etc. Everyone during outage goes to twitter to ask what happened, that's how they could know we exist. How we can check if the reddit is down? Haven't investigated it yet. There is this site or starters: https://www.redditstatus.com/

EDIT: Not sure if it's worth the effort because such events occur very rarely.