The honest answer is, I was a reddit mod for 12 years. I gradually built my community up from nothing to just under 150k users when I quit, which was actually really impressive for my niche sport. I even paid money out of my pocket to host monthly contests in the early days because I cared and it was a simple way to bring people to the sub from other places on the internet…
But the API fiasco on reddit was my wake up call… I really should’ve seen the writing on the wall much sooner. But I didn’t… So I have no interest in managing communities anymore. It’s a largely thankless task and the work never ends. I truly appreciate anyone willing to step up to create/mod communities on lemmy but count me out. I’m going to contribute by posting interesting articles to relevant communities whenever possible - but that’s as far as I’m willing to go these days. I burned out.
Wow, you certainly sunk in more resources than I did! I didn’t mean that you should run the community anywhere near that deeply; I meant just to create it so that there could be a home for Lemmy’s fans of the topic, who would then carry it on. But yeah, unless you’re getting something personal out of it then it’s not worth the effort.
Just making the community and hoping a critical mass of users will show up just doesn’t work. When it comes to niche hobbies/fandoms/etc, the venn diagram overlap of people interested in that niche and people who are active on Lemmy - which is itself a niche platform - may be as little as one or two users.
True… for now! The upcoming Reddit paywall ushered me here, so I’m hoping it will encourage more people too. Either way, I’m not just not gonna make the community…
I totally understand your point. Just saying, I did my time and I’m burned out. I like the fediverse and I like Lemmy. I trust that there are good people willing to do the work here though. It sucks that some of the niche subs I loved on reddit still only really exist there… But there was a time when they didn’t exist on reddit either. People like me built those communities on reddit. People will do so here too.
The honest answer is, I was a reddit mod for 12 years. I gradually built my community up from nothing to just under 150k users when I quit, which was actually really impressive for my niche sport. I even paid money out of my pocket to host monthly contests in the early days because I cared and it was a simple way to bring people to the sub from other places on the internet…
But the API fiasco on reddit was my wake up call… I really should’ve seen the writing on the wall much sooner. But I didn’t… So I have no interest in managing communities anymore. It’s a largely thankless task and the work never ends. I truly appreciate anyone willing to step up to create/mod communities on lemmy but count me out. I’m going to contribute by posting interesting articles to relevant communities whenever possible - but that’s as far as I’m willing to go these days. I burned out.
Wow, you certainly sunk in more resources than I did! I didn’t mean that you should run the community anywhere near that deeply; I meant just to create it so that there could be a home for Lemmy’s fans of the topic, who would then carry it on. But yeah, unless you’re getting something personal out of it then it’s not worth the effort.
Just making the community and hoping a critical mass of users will show up just doesn’t work. When it comes to niche hobbies/fandoms/etc, the venn diagram overlap of people interested in that niche and people who are active on Lemmy - which is itself a niche platform - may be as little as one or two users.
True… for now! The upcoming Reddit paywall ushered me here, so I’m hoping it will encourage more people too. Either way, I’m not just not gonna make the community…
I totally understand your point. Just saying, I did my time and I’m burned out. I like the fediverse and I like Lemmy. I trust that there are good people willing to do the work here though. It sucks that some of the niche subs I loved on reddit still only really exist there… But there was a time when they didn’t exist on reddit either. People like me built those communities on reddit. People will do so here too.