I started moderating !animation@lemm.ee about two weeks ago. I don't feel demotivated so far because it's still early days and I think it's a fairly niche topic. Especially among Lemmy's somewhat older userbase. On top of that the subscriber count has more than tripled during that time so I'm pretty happy with that. The one thing that frustrates me are the occasional random downvotes. I'm certain most of them are just by people not subscribed. I kind of wish there was a way to set it up so only subscribers to the community could downvote.

The 1 post that got a huge amount of traction and a lot of fun conversation (even though some of it was off topic) was a discussion question in the form of a meme. I wanted to try it out because on the ALL feed, the majority of the most popular posts are memes. It's not something I want to do too often because I don't want that to be the focus, but I'll probably do it from time to time in the hopes of getting more people engaged. And maybe pull some more subscribers.