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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I don't like "big" instances, since they tend to quickly walk back on their promised goals once they no longer can manage their size. So when I joined Lemmy it was on a smaller now defunct vlemmy.net instance. The idea of operating and moderating the community was not that appealing, but it was a way to promote the instance, so I started !globalnews@vlemmy.net and !databreaches@vlemmy.net. It was a slow start, but they grew over time, reaching 1000/400 subscribers respectively and then the admin killed the instance and vanished. That was a lesson.
After that, I joined lemmy.zip, it was tiny then, but it had a lot of things going for it, multiple admins, multiple communication channels, transparent finances and good base rules. What it lacked was content. So I had to decide if it was worth my time to start over by creating another community and help it grow. I re-started !globalnews@lemmy.zip and !databreaches@lemmy.zip and just started posting without any expectations. It was an outlet to share what I found interesting or what caught my eye. Eventually, people started commenting, and organic discussions started happening. I expanded the number of communities I moderate now, but the principles are the same. No expectations.
So the reason for all this backstory is that I stay motived by believing in the project and wanting to help good instances to grow. If not for Lemmy I wouldn't be posting anywhere else, never moderated on Reddit, never even posted on Reddit, was a habitual lurker there.
Just find topics you are interested in, maybe set up an RSS client and share the content that you find interesting yourself.
- Thanks for sharing your experience. I see your posts every day, impressive

It's never bothered me - I talk to myself a lot anyway.

It's a little disconcerting when I post stuff and people (I assume) down vote it because they can't be bothered to read past the headline.
I posted a video to an almost dead Tron community with Joseph Kosinski talking about Tron Legacy being released in 4K.
But, again, I assume, because the video thumbnail and description was all about Top Gun Maverick...⬇️👇⬇️👇⬇️
- I chose my current instance because they disable downvotes for this reason. At least it's one less vector of negativity
  
  You say that, but I recently had a comment deleted and got banned from a community on that instance. I wasn't being a jerk or anything. The mod was power tripping.

I'm kind of giving up. When I came over during the Reddit APIpocolypse, I tried to post as much as I could. My posts here don't get much engagement, and only seem to reach a small audience, so it doesn't feel like it's worth the effort.
I still try to post and comment, but it feels like a slog sometimes.
- Completely get what you feel. I had a look at your last posts, at least the good a few comments, that's something.
  Sometimes it's even worse, you post then all you get back is negativity. I just posted on !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world, there are some comments which I just reported
  
  I had a look at your last posts, at least the good a few comments, that's something.
  Yeah. When I post about politics, I often get some responses. They tend to be pretty same-y, but it's better than nothing.
  I'm sorry you're getting unnecessarily hostile comments on your posts. That's disheartening.
- Don't ever think it's up to you or any individual to carry the success of Lemmy or individual communities. Post what you think is worth sharing and don't force yourself if you don't feel like it. If Lemmy is to be more popular it will be on the backs of many people collectively.

I haven't been posting / commenting as much recently because I've been busy with life stuff, but I do like seeing the posts (ex. I enjoy seeing the Lego posts). It would be nice to have more comments, but otherwise I usually upvote or save the post
One thing I've noticed is that even on Reddit, there are more posts with lots of upvotes and no comments. I'm not sure why that is
I'm planning to get posting again, but what I've found is that a lot of posts in the niche communities didn't go anywhere. Then every now and then a post takes off and a lot of people see it.
Best is when other people start posting too (ex. !publichealth@mander.xyz ). I guess it takes time for an active contributor with similar interests to find the community, since others might not encounter enough content outside of Lemmy to post them
- Best is when other people start posting too (ex. !publichealth@mander.xyz ). I guess it takes time for an active contributor with similar interests to find the community, since others might not encounter enough content outside of Lemmy to post them
  Definitely. I'm kind of waiting to find another poster on most of my communities, feels almost like searching for a soulmate ha ha
  
  I’m kind of waiting to find another poster on most of my communities, feels almost like searching for a soulmate ha ha
  Yeah, even one other poster is definitely motivating. Shout-out to @llamacoffee@lemmy.world for their posts in !spacex@sh.itjust.works and !spaceflight@sh.itjust.works!
- A lot of people simply are lurkers. I know so many people irl who browse sites like reddit, 9gag, news sites or whatever all the time, and never in their life would consider to post comments.
  
  Oh, definitely. The 90 lurkers - 9 commenters - 1 poster ratio seems to apply on Lemmy too. It might even be less, because it would mean that out of 50k people, there would be 500 posters?
- even on Reddit, there are more posts with lots of upvotes and no comments. I’m not sure why that is
  Could these be from repost bots?
  
  Most probably

I do this for a few sublemmys like !nasa@lemmy.world and !esa@feddit.nl. I view it as keeping communities on "life support" until Lemmy grows a bit more.
One of the best practices I can think of is to cross-post a post with text in the body (important) from a small sublemmy to a large sublemmy. This creates a link to the original post on the smaller community, and gives it some visibility.
- Text in the body should be required.
- Do you think it would make more sense to have just one umbrella "space" community, on maybe mander.xyz (which already has !astronomy@mander.xyz ), or even !space@lemmy.world ?

Part of the problem may be lack of tagging and filtering tools.
For example:
I'm not interested in memes so if a community is largely filled with them, my only way to avoid them may be to block the community. This includes communities that I might otherwise subscribe to, or want to engage with.
This is also tied into community fragmentation, community discoverability, and feeling the need to browse All to see anything. I don't know how widespread my issue is, but I have seen others mentioning having extensive block lists of communities.
- Which community did you post to where you where the only one posting?
  
  I'm responding more to the feeling that a community has a single human posting. Even as a reader it can feel that way.

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 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.
- 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

I don't mind the slower nature of lemmy. I like how quiet it is compared to the karma farming spam bot hell reddit was.
- This.

I don't mind. We're still early adopters here really. I see it as slowly building a stronger place for people to find in future exoduses.

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.
- Hello,
  Welcome here, thank you for your comment, happy to see that your community is doing well. I'll add a link to the sidebar of !movies@lemm.ee
  
  Oh awesome. That's very nice of you. I've done the same.

op, from someone who browses /c/all, I frequently see your posts, so thanks, keep on keeping on
- Thank you for your comment!

I posted some stuff and ran into this plus my threads not getting federated to certain places. And 3 weeks later they are still the newest posts on those communities (Kbin's ps1graphics and blender communities, note that Kbin communities seem to not use the community link format).
I had some technical questions and a roadblock too, but they are niche so I just... didn't deal with it. Maybe there's an instance out there that'd fit (for me, someone who dabbles in art and programming while not really being those things), but also I doubt it particularly because I'm only interested in a semi-niche programming language. Audience vs niche seems like an unwinnable balance.
I've thought about posting to a more popular lemmy.world community for the next thing I make as it would probably get more of a response, but probably not answers so that wouldn't matter since the stuff I made so far was just random objects. Well, I guess getting answers for Blender questions is more likely.
- Hello,
  Welcome here! Did you try !blender@lemmy.world? Seems reasonable active, and with a 2.5k userbase.
  But yes indeed, it's sometimes difficult to find the audience for a niche topic, general topics do better on average
  
  I haven't, the other community I was thinking of is !artshare which has 3.94K subs.
  My style is low-poly with vertex colors (no textures). My Blender questions weren't really that important, the roadblock I am having is trying to use said models in a specific framework (or maybe the very specific bindings I'm using) just not loading vertex colors (I am not sure if there is 'help' here, aside from just fix it).

These things take time. I’ve saved discords in the past by making interesting comments or posts that created conversations. Lemmy is growing, and quality content attracts quality content.
- Lemmy is growing
  I'm not so sure, https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats, there is a slow but constant loss of users
  
  I wonder why that is? 🤔

Ah, I really enjoyed interestingasfuck at the other place, I posted one just now, I'd like to see that community succeed.
- Thanks! Hopefully it will!

On Facebook, before I stopped, I tried writing well sourced political pieces and no amount of engagement was enough - when there was none it was... Annoying maybe, or disheartening. It made me think about why I was doing it.
I stopped posting on Facebook and I'm slowly moving to my own site and the fediverse.
So I'd say reflect on why you're doing it and hopefully align your actions or expectations with that introspection.
- Curious, what is your site? Did you post it somewhere on the Fediverse? In which community?
  
  I haven't yet; moving from a Jekyll based blog to a different stack at the moment. Been doing a lot of digital migrations like to proton and such this past month.
  I'll post it when there's enough on there to be proud of or worth showing. Thanks for the curiosity.
  What's important is we never stop trying to connect, we keep pushing for meaningful dialogues and educating ourselves and our neighbors.

I feel having a balance between more popular and widely used communitys as well as smaller and nicher ones work pretty well for me, where I admin 3 rather popular and broad communitys and 3 small and very niche ones. That way it just feels like more is happening yknow?
I also can only recommend utilising a Post Schedueler and making 1-2 weeks worth of posts at a time! When you manually post daily, it does feel pretty lonely, but if you do all the work in a few hours for 2 weeks like I usually do, it really does feel less like shouting into a void since you aren't actively posting per say that way
- Balance is an interesting approach, I kind of have it too without realizing it.
  The post scheduler can help, but in my case I like to see how the post is received in real time ha ha
  
  I mean, the posts are usually schedueled for the same time with 5 minutes apart. I always look forward to letting them all post and then looking over them all at once!

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