For those of us here for awhile, there’s a good chance we’ve adjusted our settings and built up blocklists that distance us from new people’s experience of these sites, so we gotta remember and work the Defaults.
One example of this is the sorting method. Most Lemmy instances stay with the default Active sort, which means the posts that many are seeing are those being voted on a bunch and receiving comments.
What this means for those trying to build communities is partly what one may already have thought of, make posts that inspire discussion, but another part that one may fumble, which is to reply to whatever comments that may appear.
This may be a little part to why some communities struggle to get others involved. Posts may be getting upvoted, but without any comments they may not be as widely seen or gain as much traction as they otherwise could with the way Active sort works.
Interestingly Mbin and Piefed appear to default to Hot for their sorting method, which if it’s like Lemmy’s Hot sort, may be a little more helpful in surfacing some communities’ posts.
That’s just one example though, what other Default details do you try to keep in mind as you try to get communities going?
Shout out to the SquaredCircle community in this regard. The moderators there do a fantastic job of making the place seem worthwhile to participate in. Even if it’s just the same two moderators working over time to make people feel welcome, it’s nice that I can go there and be the only one commenting on the least popular wrestling promotion and still get responses and feedback. And it makes me feel like going back again and again.
In comparison, there’s other communities with a sea of posts with no upvotes getting posted daily. But no interaction. And if you do, no one gives a shit or is going to interact with you anyway. And the way I see it, the first ‘fans’ in any community should be the moderators. They should be encouraging discussion instead of just dumping links to 20 articles a day.
While it’s nice to have certain spaces to dump your thoughts on the TV show that you just watched or whatever, when there’s zero activity and no other fans, it just makes you think that there must be a better community somewhere else, maybe on another platform.
I wonder if the default should be changed, do people actually like Active?
Scaled is only good for Subscribed I think, it’s not great for All, at least not for new users
It’s a default that admins running newer versions of Lemmy (v0.19.4 onward) can change if desired, but that might be a little awkward to do for existing instances compared to newer ones.
