Like others, I came over when Reddit was banning 3rd party apps. Many communities were being started and I wanted to help. So I chose one community to form here and try and grow. And we did! There was a time a short while in the little KC Chiefs community was in the top 100 communities on Lemmy world. I knew that wouldn’t last that we would be outpaced by many more broad appeal communities but I didn’t predict the reverse in engagement growth that has come. Stagnation sure, I didn’t think Lemmy was going to surpass reddit for a long while yet, but not the barren communities of today. Meme communities and the “small gripe” adjacent communities are doing fine, but it seems all others have shrunk. I tried to keep the Kerbal Space Program community active for a bit but had to return to the official forums and even subreddit for discussion. The post I made in the Go community here remains the only post in the community.
A platform led by a CEO who edits comments of users, lies about other professionals and then double downs on the lie when proven to be a liar can’t be trusted. And in general I prefer the decentralized open source backbone of Lemmy to the ad ridden, rage bait and bug filled Reddit. I’d love for this to be my full time home for discussing my niche interests but that’s not possible without others engaging with the content.
I posted a lot in the beginning, tried to comment a lot too but now it feels like talking to myself when I make a new post in the community I started and get few or no responses. What can be done? Community specific advice is nice, but I’m looking more for Lemmy World level solutions as I’m sure there’s many many other niche communities I’m not apart of experiencing the same thing.
I'm sole mod (not the original creator, but took over when they went awol) for the knitting community at !knitting@lemmy.world, and I do my best to contribute a lot to the cross stitch & embroidery one at !lemmy_stitch@sh.itjust.works too. This is coming from a history of running various niche online groups. So a few things I would advise:
But if your topic is big enough to in theory get decent traction:
Be grateful for what users you do have. You said you sometimes get "few" replies, so make sure you're getting to know those people and replying to them and continuing the conversation where appropriate. You don't need a lot of users, you just need a few engaged ones to make for a nice community.
Recruit your friends. You're a Chiefs fan, you probably know other Chiefs fans. Get them interested.
Drop your community link wherever its relevant. People don't like having to put effort into finding new communities but if they just happen to come across mention of it, they'll click. Obviously I'm not saying spam, but there are plenty of sports fans here and it's bound to come up in conversation.
Crosspost. Any posts you make to a Chiefs community are probably also relevant to the wider NFL communities or maybe fantasy football players. And again this just gives more people the chance to stumble across the fact that you exist.
Ok these next couple are more involved, but they do work well!
Consider Mastodon. I have a craft-focused account there too, and if I have a question about knitting or cross stitch or whatever then the more answers I can get the better, right? So I use the fact that we can post from Mastodon, to a Lemmy community, combining the replies from both audiences in one thread. Example of what I mean here.
Create value. Could be by posting pillar content that's actually useful (in your case could be some kind of statistical analysis, we all know the football nerds love it, but whatever will be long-term useful / interesting to your audience). Or it could be a regular community event or something ("predict the Chiefs wins/losses for the upcoming season and win something, etc etc).
Ask your existing users what they'd like to see from the community. Some things you try will hit and some will miss, but getting feedback is going to up your chances!
That's everything off the top of my head and it's already a wall of text so I'll stop there. It is absolutely difficult to be a mod, it can be a lot of work to get to the point of just having an active community that doesn't need your input to keep rolling. But if your community see you trying, I think that goes a long way. Hope some of this was helpful!
I really like the mastodon suggestion, thank you!
Happy to help! I know it sounds kind of weird, posting from another platform. But if you look at it less as "how can I make MY community with MY name on it the BEST so everyone will worship ME" and more "how can I actually bring people together over a shared topic" it makes a lot of sense :)
I do wish the integration was a bit better though. It's got its quirks, to put it mildly!