I love the “cassette-futurism” aesthetic / niche, but hadn’t really thought about it for some time, until I hit up our FV community just now, and submitted a little article about an item I found, yesterday.
Problem? I happened to notice that in that /c, the prior posts dated to 2mos ago, and that currently, the place is effectively dormant, if not outright dead. This to me is a right-old shame, given that 200+ posts had been made there already, meaning to me that a sincere & sustained effort had been made to launch it and keep it going for a quite a while, until… well. Whatever happened.
Just in general, though-- I would think that anyone who’s been a part of the Fediverse for a while has noticed the heavy trend of communities being created all the time, with most of them crashing and burning relatively shortly thereafter. Or others, persisting for a while, until the creators or contributors dried up at some point.
Still, at the end of the day, the FV is full of dead communities that succumbed for one reason or another, and that’s unfortunately just sort of… natural, right? That said, I do not like it when it happens to concepts and communities that I love and support!
So what’s my point, here?
Er… well… I was thinking that maybe as a group-effort, some of us might-potentially rotate our posts a bit between communities that we wanted to support, to help keep them going?
Obviously that would need to be cross-organised in terms of groups of people and groups of communities, but I’m wondering if maybe that might help in such situations? For example, let’s say that every week I create 1-3 posts for a rotating schedule of critical communities I appreciate, so to speak. And others in the sign-up list do the same, see? In which case we together help keep those communities going on until they potentially ‘catch fire’ in a larger, self-sustaining sense, so to speak. Or something like that?
Not sure if all that makes sense, but… there it is.
@scirocco@lemmy.world, @blaze@piefed.zip, @threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works
You cannot force something like this - people either like this place or they do not.
Part of what everyone is waiting for is the tools and the UI/UX to get better. Lemmy is moving forward at a glacial snail’s pace, and while PieFed is zooming ahead by comparison it is also apparent to everyone how “opinionated” the software is. And that severely turns people away who are the main ones keeping communities alive - e.g. PugJesus. A few examples are the recent introduction of the vote quota, the disabling of ability to see downvote counts, and defederation of the lemvotes instance (this one limited to the PieFed.social instance rather than software, but still relevant especially as that is the flagship instance) thereby preventing people from seeing who voted on what content, which otherwise can be done by most every other instance across the entire Threadiverse.
The Threadiverse, and Fediverse too, is dying off, rather than growing. I suggest you make your peace that it is simply going to be this way, for roughly the next half to full decade at least, until the software catches up and until people start focusing on making communities FUN to visit here. Instead, this place is like a ghost town where people either shout their thoughts into the void with barely any reception at all (as your post mentioned), or else the handful of actually active super-communities where all the toxicity is. One reason for that btw is the overall lack of moderation support - e.g. Lemmy will not federate mod reports to people using accounts elsewhere than the same instance the community is located on until it catches up to v1.0, which based on past software upgrades could take something like or even more than a year to become fully deployed across the Threadiverse.
I can give you an irl example of a community dying off in real time: along with m_f who you have discussed with here in this post I help moderate the community !askUSA@discuss.online. There are only 2 main rules: be nice and put political content elsewhere (we even provide specific links to multiple communities that people might want to use in the community side bar). However, after Donald Trump won the last USA Presidential election, virtually nobody - including us as the mods - wants to post to that community, and those very few that do were highly enriched in political content for a long while. We’ve decided to ignore our own rules and leave those few posts up, but even then almost nobody comments or votes. I might literally end up in a concentration camp, sent somewhere in the world that I’ve never so much as visited before, as a result of being here on the Threadiverse, or specifically being connected to that community, if it gets used to agitate leftist fighting against the system.
And other than politics, what else even is there to talk about, regarding specifically the USA, lately?
You cannot force “engagement” (nor should anyone try imho), you can only encourage it. If a place is WELCOMING, then people will eventually come and want to join it. There’s not much else that can be done in the meantime, as we wait for the software to get better - e.g. people report leaving Lemmy due to our toxicity, which relates to the lack of moderation, which relates to the lack of mod reports being allowed to federate, so when that changes… it will allow this space to change, but before that software upgrade gets rolled out it remains an uphill battle, not likely to be won except by the most enormous of efforts and at great cost, far out of proportion to the rewards received for having done so.
The Fediverse is dying, and there isn’t much anyone can do about it, for now. In the short term I recommend using this place as not your sole form of social media - the content simply is not here, and increasingly the amount of content trends downwards rather than upwards (e.g. we are losing PugJesus, and like a year ago we lost FlyingSquid, which are 2 of the 3 top posters we had, making the vast majority of posts across all communities).