In my experience, once a community reaches certain size, it grows organically. But reaching that cricial mass is hard.
So I thought that a coordinated “consented white hat brigading” might help. What I mean is for a group of users to focus on one or a few communities for a while trying to get them to that point posting and commenting (quality content).
It should be done asking the moderators for permission first. There may be communities that don’t want to grow this way.
Disclaimer (because I got a comment in a similar post saying “Give it time”): I’m not trying to rush the growth, IMHO people should post as much as they want and not take it as a chore. I’m thiking of focusing the (natural) activity of those users interested in helping small communities (that want to grow).
Any growth that isn’t organic isn’t gonna last because it isn’t real. You can artificially inflate your participation statistics with artificial participation, but as soon as that ends, you’re going to return back to your base numbers. It’s extremely unlikely, in my opinion, that what you’re proposing would actually trigger organic growth on its own that would be of any meaningful or lasting quality.
That’s not really what OP is suggesting we do. They’re not suggesting that posts should be upvoted for visibility, but that communities should be posted to for discoverability. The former would only be a transient bump in the stats, but the growth that comes from the latter, that being subscribers and new contributors, is not. Every sub, every new poster, will engage because they want to. The point isn’t to “fake” activity with a lot of posts, the point is to be found by real, but simply more casual, users.
A community can live by one avid poster, or ten less active ones. But to get the latter, you need a jumpstart by the former.
I agree and I also think they mean to authentically comment. Pick places you would want to interact with anyway.
Of course I could be wrong, but I don’t agree.
When people go to a community in which its last post was 2 weeks ago, it’s much less likely that they interact with that community (posting or commenting) than if the community has multiple posts per day. And that also affects the possibility that they come back in the next days. If you set the proper environment for enough users to interact and come back then, when the “campaign” ends, the level can be much greater than when it started.
I’m not saying that just posting a lot in a community for a few days guarantees it will grow after that, that’s not how communities work. What I’m saying is that it can work with different degrees of success. And, if done properly, it can be fun to try.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t try, and maybe I’m wrong. I’ve seen people try this on reddit and have it not work, but maybe lemmy is different. also, perhaps it depends on the community/subject matter itself?
best of luck!
My (100% speculative) theory is that lemmy/fediverse is too disperse for its size, a lot of very small communities with the exception of a very small number of successful ones.
If that’s the case, this could help with the “nucleation” of mid size communities in the short term.
I also find the experiment interesting and fun by itself. As said in the post, I don’t think anyone should post more that they like just for the sake of growth.
Thanks for the feedback!
I think you’ve seen it work, you just didn’t know it.
That’s true to an extend, but at the same time there is an “empty dancefloor situation” in a lot of communities where any quality post you would make would be upvoted instantly by 200-300 people, but people don’t want to post themselves because there is no content