Imma preface this by saying that I’m not an admin or mod here, these are just my thoughts & advice on the matter.
You’ve noticed that a community doesn’t exist on Lemmy. I’m going to assume you’ve checked the community browser, and seen that that specific community doesn’t exist. So, you’ve gone to communities, typed in the name, and are about to hit create.
Well, hold up a second. There’s an INSANE amount of community spam going on in lemmy.ml, and it looks like it’s starting here to a much lesser degree.
Some questions you should ask:
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Are you creating this community just to create it? By that I mean, are you willing to put in the work as the moderator if it does take off?
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Is it a niche community of a larger subset that has a thriving community or a completely new category?
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Are you willing to regularly post stuff to start seeding comments & advertise it in the relevant places?
If the answer to any of these is no, get your cursor off that create button and go join the bigger communities. It just makes it harder to find communities that aren’t 100% dead when half of them are dead-ends created just because ‘they exist on Reddit’. Once there are enough people are visiting !gaming@beehaw.org, they spill over into !rpg@lemmy.ml if they want more focused TTRPG stuff. Once there are enough people on !rpg@lemmy.ml, they’ll spill over to my Shadowrun group. Lots of communities are fractal in nature, and people are skipping a few steps. The userbase needs time to grow and mature.
Please think before you make a community.
I created a magazine, I think it was yesterday or the day before (you can see it in my profile, I think). So, here are my answers to those questions.
1. Are you creating this community just to create it? By that I mean, are you willing to put in the work as the moderator if it does take off?
I doubt it’ll ever take off, because few people benefit from the theme my community is about. Even on Reddit it has fewer users compared to the big one called ADHD, and the posts created are like 5 or 6 everyday.
2. Is it a niche community of a larger subset that has a thriving community, or a completely new category?
It’s a niche community of a larger subset that can potentially have a thriving community, as it’s ADHD. My community is related to ADHD.
3. Are you willing to regularly post stuff to start seeding comments & advertise it in the relevant places?
My community doesn’t rely on links or videos because the few useful links on the Internet are a bit old, usually from research documents and studies. Same thing with videos about their age and scarcity. The only thing my community could rely is text posts to give/ask for support, motivation, advice, vent…