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?