How do you deal with being the only one posting in a community (aka "shouting into the void")?

I'm not gonna lie, sometimes it feels a bit lonely. I try to post on a few generic communities

Sometimes I can be the only poster for a few weeks. Makes me requestion the relevance of posting at all. I started posting to !pics@lemmy.world recently just because at least my posts are widely seen, and other people post there as well.

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Sometimes I question the fact that some communities might be too niche, but even on something as generic as !movies@lemm.ee there aren't that many people wanting to talk about movies
- I feel like Lemmites generally have a handful of interests: US politics, Linux, and Star Trek. I guess the war in Gaza gets a lot of comments too. But outside of that range, it gets pretty quiet.
  Going back to Reddit every now and then, it's nice to see conversations on other topics.
  
  Yes, it's kind of strange. I have been trying to correct that with recents posts in !pics@lemmy.world and !interestingasfuck@lemm.ee.
  We are 50k people here, don't tell me there is no one that likes other stuff that the one you listed.
  
  I think some of this may be the default Active sort setting for the all/federated feed keeping some communities and their posts around the top. Might be mistaken, but my understanding is that it primarily elevates upvoted posts with recent comments, leaning on recent comments for keeping it visible.
  Problem is, that means some posts that may get a decent amount of upvotes but no or few comments may gradually get buried, only rising to the top briefly or on some slower days.
  I think as a result of getting buried, some may not see the other stuff they might want to talk about to comment on, and besides that, I sometimes get the sense there are a lot of lurkers around here, voting on stuff but otherwise not commenting either for lack of anything to add or not wanting to risk getting into arguments (if not both).
  
  voting on stuff but otherwise not commenting either for lack of anything to add
  I see myself in this comment and I don't like it. It's hard to make the first comment though. Any suggestions?
  
  What you did at the end can be a good approach tbh. Be curious and ask something about the post, or something in it that you're not sure of or familiar with, or if the OP hasn't added any body text or indications in the title and simply posted, what their opinion on it is, or if it's like a show/story/site/product, what's the premise or what's up with it and what they like about it.
  Also if you don't want to focus it on the OP, in the absence of other comments, you can say as much like, "Do you (including anyone else reading) know/think [somethingsomething here]?"
  
  Hello, good to see you here.
  You might be right, this is indeed a filtering issue. I use "New comments" on Subscribed, and then "Top X hours" on All, but people who use Active must definitely be missing on some.
- I think part of the issue is there's multiple communities on different instances for the same topic. I'm subscribed to like 4 different movie communities. If we all just stuck to one, maybe there would be better engagement?
  
  That's interesting, because I can exactly tell you why there are so many movies communities
  !movies@lemmy.world got created but is pretty much unmanaged. People on LW just post there out of habit, or because they support LW
  there was historically a moviesandtv on an instance called lemmy.film. It was getting some traction, but then the instance disappeared
  to keep another instance out of LW, people (including me) got involved into !moviesandtv@lemm.ee. It was going well, but at some point I suggested to have discussion threads for current movies, and to engage more with the community. The mod found that "backseat moderating" and banned me. The details can be found in the spoilers in the OP here: https://lemmy.world/post/11446250?scrollToComments=true
  I thus took over !movies@lemm.ee, to kind of have that space to discuss movies.
  I think we might consider posting to !movies@lemmy.world to promote the two others on Lemm.ee. I actually did that 2 months ago to talk about the Dune discussion thread we had on !movies@lemm.ee: https://lemmy.world/post/12820343?scrollToComments=true
  18 upvotes, no comments, and that's it. I guess a few people went there, but I'm not sure.
  
  Dang, this sucks. I usually post news rather than open discussions so I never noticed. I had my own disagreements with lemm.ee admin back in the day which is why I'm on sopuli.xyz among some other things.
  I do wonder if going with movies community on an instance that has more broad one already is too much of a handicap. Something like beehaws's c/entertainment could work if parked at some instance that's federated well enough.
  
  Open discussions are always the hardest things to get comments and actual conversations in the comments, except maybe in the AskLemmy community where it works well.
  
  I do wonder if going with movies community on an instance that has more broad one already is too much of a handicap
  It might be, I just posted on !movies@lemmy.world (not wanting to get another account banned on !moviesandtv@lemm.ee ), we'll see how it goes
  I don't think that's much of an issue to be honest, and even if it is, having a "large" audience able to see it from their local feed should outweigh the con.
  
  Well, that's ridiculous! I imagine there are similar stories for other communities as well which ends up with a bunch of fragmentation.
  
  I imagine there are similar stories for other communities as well which ends up with a bunch of fragmentation.
  We narrowly avoided fragmentation with !lemmyapps@lemmy.world and !lemmyapps@sh.itjust.works. Some amount of consolidation is definitely a good thing especially since Lemmy's userbase is still small.
  
  That was another shitshow, probably the worst I've ever seen on Lemmy
  
  I agree with you.
  I even escalated the "power tripping" of the mod of !moviesandtv@lemm.ee at the time to the admin instance, but their stance was that they didn't want to interfere with the moderation of communities, as that would be themselves powertripping.
  I'm going to post to the LW community to advertise !movies@lemm.ee at least
- Isn't this because there's already moviesandtv which seems to be better suited to the current community size?
  
  moviesandtv exist, but don't really allow people to discuss movies and shows, it's mostly about news.
  I suggested at the time to just have a pinned post like "what have you been watching", but got banned by the mod for "backseat moderation" (see below: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/8381687)
  The other issue is that as Lemmy posts don't have unique URLs that can be used by every instance, you can't just have a megathread with links to discussion threads, as that would work only for one instance
  
  The other issue is that as Lemmy posts don't have unique URLs that can be used by every instance, you can't just have a megathread with links to discussion threads, as that would work only for one instance
  I'm curious as to how Lemmy apps solve this issue (which they seem to have done), and why the web interface doesn't have similar functionality. In Eternity and Thunder, I can tap on a link to a post on another instance, and it opens the corresponding post on my home instance.
  Is there some lookup table under the hood to match post IDs between instances? Whatever system apps are using, why would this not work more broadly?
  
  Interesting, I never noticed, guess I'll have to reinstall Thunder.
  On browser, there is lemmyverse.link, but
  if the site goes down, all your links are now dead
  having to select the instance people want to see the link would probably be annoying to most users
  I am not sure how apps can do it better than the web UI, but I had a quick look on the Github and that issue is still open: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2987
  
  For now, Lemmy Universal Link Switcher is a great browser script which mostly simulates the functionality of instance agnostic post and comment links. It would be great if the equivalent functionality could be integrated natively into Lemmy though.
  
  Indeed!

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