this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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That's been my issue. Many of the subs I followed on Reddit have been "recreated" on Lemmy, but there's essentially no one posting in them on Lemmy. Even high-effort posts, like a helpful guide, will get 1 or 2 comments compared to dozens or hundreds on Reddit. Many posts get no obvious community interaction at all.
That's okay, we can change that! Be the person who posts and interacts with the community. :) the same thing happened on reddit once upon a time.
That doesn't work, though. If I add posts and comments to, let's say, a Brazilian Jiu-jitsu community on Lemmy, that's just one more number. That isn't going to improve.
Reddit had a huge boost from Digg, and even then, it was a different time when fewer numbers were fine, and people were more willing to engage in social media at lower numbers.
If Lemmy instances are to grow, that engagement needs to be directed. It needs popular communities to be highlighted, and once consistent interaction is there, growing communities need instance owners to direct traffic/engagement their way. That's how subs like /r/soccer got off the ground, and it's probably the only way it'll happen on Lemmy.
I've been fighting to get my community off the ground and even though I do get a small amount of engagement no one else has made any posts and I honestly wonder if it'll ever get anywhere. I need to come up with something more interesting to do than I have been.
Many of the subs I spent a lot of time posting on are completely dead, bar maybe a few people that contribute 90% of all posts and comments. Others simply don't exist, and given that they were quite niche (local subs, anime subs) there's absolutely no way that they'll ever get noticed on Lemmy if something like pro wrestling has next to no posts/comments.
IMO, the only way this will improve is a combined effort from Lemmy instances to highlight great communities, and to drive people towards ones that are growing.
I personally have not seen very many Lemmy posts return on Google searches, if at all. It's not apparent whether or not they are indexed at all, and I would imagine that's a big vector for new user engagement.