I’ve been plugging away for about 2 months now trying to grow a small hobby community here on Lemmy. It’s doing well, up from 200 to 425 subscribers in the time I’ve been active.
But, sometimes it feels discouraging. I’m still the only one who posts with any regularity, and I miss the more in-depth discussions I was able to have at the other place. How long, or how many subscribers, does it take for a community to become self-sustaining?
Edit: !geocaching@lemmy.world for anyone curious
Great question, dont know the answer. Just didnt want you to feel like no one responds to this post either lol. I think generally like 90% of people are lurkers, so if you have 450 subs theres only like 45 people who are posters and even smaller subset post regularly. Of those, subset again and you have poeple who’ll post on your community. My guess is it will take a while but youre doing really good imo, the larger the community the more likely people are to sub and the bigger your subsets get. Keep it up! Whats your community?
Why is it named
NOT geocaching@lemmy.world ?
That’s the standard way to link Lemmy communities, like @username
I empathize with your situation. I’m in the same boat. Even with hundreds of subscribers, if everyone’s lurking then the community gets stale and withers. Becoming a one-person content machine isn’t sustainable.
Though on a brighter note, with this post you just gained a subscriber to your community. Browsing through it reminded me of how fun geocaching was. I just dusted off my old geocaching.com account from a decade ago. I’ll have to take my kids out and see what we can find!
What a coincidence, I just started getting back into geocaches myself!
Anyway, all the advice here is great, but I’d also like to point out that we are on the fediverse. There aren’t that many people here, compared to other platforms, and the demographic is certainly skewed one way. You can definitely use these in your favor, but don’t get discouraged when you’re “only” pulling a few hundred, when that pretty solidly puts the community into one of the big ones (again, comparatively speaking). Things are just a bit more quiet here.
Is the growth pattern exponential, bursty, steady? If it’s the first, you’re practically doubling every two months.
Pretty bursty when there’s a new post, but quiet otherwise
That’s easily one of the faster growing communities on Lemmy. That’s like 0.3% of active monthly users. 1-in-300 people is not bad at all.
I hear geocaches are often huge and obvious to see from the road.
If you want engagement, post something incorrect. People love to fix stuff. (I’m mostly kidding…). Good luck with your community!
Now that I know about it, I’ll sub!
Set a goal of so many posts per day. The best posting times are 0700, 1100, and 1630 EST for maximum exposure.
Be sure to post links to your community on social media (FB, Twitter. Mastodon, Blue Sky, Instagram, and all the rest).
Expect to spend 20-60 hours a week driving users to your content.
Unfortunately I don’t have anywhere near the time, or content ideas, for that to be sustainable. I’ll keep the posting times in mind though, that’s a good idea!
Subscriptions come from new content and exposure to that content. The more content the more subscribers and more interaction.
Don’t worry if it grows slowly. Niche communities are the best thing about Lemmy. Better to have a small loyal community than a big one flooded with crap.
I didn’t know about your community till I saw this post, and I’m interested. Have you considered adding a community-maintained “getting started with geocaching” doc to the sidebar? I’m not saying that’ll solve the problem immediately but I think it could help people decide to join when they’re exploring Lemmy.
Like others said, such a small percentage actuslly post. So anything that helps drive traffic up can help. From an seo perspective you’ve just got to be the most helpful resource if you want that sweet sweet traffic.
It’s impossible to answers that some can take few weeks, some few month, some few year and some will never grow
