Are you and your friends actual historians?
Absolutely not. You should peruse through their post history. They took the community over and expect everyone to act like their personal Wikipedia bot and slave away answering their dozens of inane questions each day.
Focus on boosting comments instead of sheer volume of posts—people post specifically because they want answers, and seeing a long stream of posts with no responses makes them think it’s not worth bothering.
I think people’s familiarity with the r/askhistorians subreddit may be discouraging anyone without graduate-level academic experience from responding, but the subreddit didn’t start out requiring that level of rigor—it became more selective as the volume of replies increased. But for here, even a general-knowledge reply can encourage clarifying comments from more-informed people who may otherwise doubt their qualifications.
Honestly?
Get some real historians.
Without people that are actually in the field, with stringent standards to go along with that, you’ll only get casual and unreliable answers. Which means that nobody wanting a good answer with depth and historiography is going to waste their time. Most of the time, responses there aren’t half as informative as Pugjesus’ memes.
R/askhistorians worked because it was run by experts and expert level responses were the only kind allowed. You knew going in that you might not get an answer at all, but if you did it was going to be relevant and be good enough to use as a source for a paper.
Nothing on the fediverse has that level of effort put into it.
Also, being real here, the moderation team having zero background in history research means that it’s incredibly unlikely to ever draw real historians to ask questions of. Why would they?
Could you hypothetically make it happen? Sure. I guess. If you reach out to some of the people that were generalists back on reddit, charm them into the idea of a more open forum, help them onboard, and make certain your mod team is both vigorous and rigorous, you might, might get a couple. I doubt it, since the ones that fled reddit already said that the lack of robust mod tools made them unwilling to start up here. But if you’re serious enough about it, maybe it could work.
Again, being real, while I appreciate your presence and activity, Don, you gotta realize that the percentage of historians that would consider it are very likely to see you as the mod and nope the fuck out. I hate dumping on you because I genuinely love the effort you put in to asking things nobody would otherwise bring up. But that same user history is offputting if someone were looking at it as an indicator of how serious a community will be run. I’m sorry to say it though, I really do appreciate you.
Keep posting daily for a couple years. That and post on !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca .
Answers would help. Posting random questions hoping others will answer isn’t what makes an Ask[X] community.
Just a guess, but maybe that you post a seemingly endless stream of mostly insincere and/or easily searched questions while rarely engaging with the people who answer you isn’t leading to interest in your other projects.
Which couple mated?
There’s nothing you can do.
I single-handedly carried the Jazz community for a year until I said fuck you people and I gave up.
I just think it is the nature of social media, only 1 out of 300 people want to contribute and put in effort for others to enjoy, the rest just want to drink from the content fire hose and be spoon-fed. And that’s me being generous.
