Weekly thread - how is everyone doing with their communities?

I've been feeling a bit negatively lately. I know I've stated a lot of times over the last year that I feel I'm getting less traffic, but it usually stabilized after a week or so. But now I feel the weekends into Monday are super dead for me, and I'm having trouble getting posts to the like-count that I used to, and most importantly, I feel there are less people talking and asking questions in comments.

There are some great users who have been here forever now, and I'm extremely grateful for what they do add to the comments, but I don't think I'm getting as many questions asked, and I've been trying to share more varied content, but it doesn't move the needle all that much.

I've started reducing the amounts of things I share from 5 a day to 3-4 now. The lower interest has me spending time I'd be making posts on other things instead, so I haven't been preparing as much work or doing any deep dives into things like I was.

I'm still here all the time reading things and responding to the comments I do get, but like the comments on this thread from Captain Patrick, this place hasn't quite been what it was 2 years ago. So much angry and violent talk. Many obvious cases of people responding from emotion from headlines and not actually reading articles. More infighting in comments. Less debate and dialog, just arguing. There's still a ton of great content, but it's being eclipsed by so much negativity.

I still think I am doing something significant here, but I can't make people happy or to participate. If I look at my upvotes, I still see other old regulars here and upvoting content, but with them being quiet I either feel their interest is waning, or that they aren't in a good enough mood to just say some little comment on things now and then. I get incentivized by seeing you all have a good time, but if it's just me and 3 people talking every day, that only takes me so far.

Just the fact that this beautifully written contribution got zero engagement for three whole hours is enough to bother me!
Many obvious cases of people responding from emotion from headlines and not actually reading articles. More infighting in comments. Less debate and dialog, just arguing.
So well put. People responding to headlines alone really is the bane of social media. Personally, I've begun to systematically add a quote from the source article, even when it doesn't add much to my comment. As a way of subtly showing others that I actually read the article and that perhaps they should too.
- I appreciate the nice words.
  I like to do the same thing, grabbing snippets of q that article, not whatever broad frustrations we have on the topic while ignoring the new info we're being given. That makes all the posts feel the same and full of mostly generalities or just straight complaining.
  There are some prior sharing really interesting and important things, and I don't get the appeal of using social media to wallow in misery when it can be used to educate and congregate. Things like 50501is using it to try to build political momentum. I want to get people interested in less familiar animals and hopefully encourage them to volunteer, donate, or at least see them as more than memes or NPCs and rather unique individuals that have important roles in our world and have full lives and semblances of individual personalities.
  It just feels we're squandering an opportunity if we just let this place turn into just another social media site.
Sorry to hear.
I feel a bit similar, but I am myself quite less active lately as I'm vacationing. I guess quite a few people in Europe are doing the same, or maybe just spending more time outside as it's summer.
Activity should probably raise again in September.
- Good points. I'm but a summer person so I hide myself indoors, but lots of other people do enjoy it and everyone's kids are out of school and such as well. None of that applies to me so I tend to overlook it.
  I don't think we have much traffic data available anywhere that one could see if it's ebb and flow or a steady change in activity, and I tend to assume the worst.
  As usual, you've managed to put some more positivity into things, and I appreciate that.

First lemm.ee goes down and I migrate to dubvee including exporting the post archive

Now dubvee.org is going down and I have to repeat the process.

Gotta say, it really zaps my enthusiasm for Lemmy with these frequent instance closures.

Maybe the instance model isn't the right one for long term federated communities.

Sorry to hear about dubvee.org shutting down.
Another harsh reminder that admin burnout is real, and that unfortunately choosing an instance with a team of multiple admins willing to keep going is probably very important as community builders.
- Yeah, well, maybe if I felt like I wasn't the only one around here taking a stand against extremism, violent rhetoric, and toxic behavior, things could have played out differently and I could have pushed on. You can't place the blame on just having a single admin - that may be one factor, but becoming completely demoralized from the lack of support from most other admins/instances was the real cause. This is a wide-ranging problem, and a single small instance (let alone a single admin) cannot solve it alone.
  Sorry not sorry - For the next 2 weeks I'm in "captain going down with his ship" mode and I'm not holding back on what I think about this place, what it's become, and where it's heading. Two years ago, we had the tools, motive, and opportunity to make something truly better here, and we failed.
Maybe the instance model isn't the right one for long term federated communities.
The primary problem here is community mobility. If any community could be, with a few key presses, decoupled from an instance and essentially plopped onto another maintaining all of the posts, comments and subscribers - it wouldn't matter as much at all. Piefed has community migration, and I assume that is ultimately the end-goal. It just needs all the major instances to read and recognise such moves.
- piefeed migration doesn't save the old non-federated content, and doesn't take over the old community name. It's more like a community clone tool. But yeah, its a good start.
- For all the whining Element gets when it comes to being buggy, etc. The matrix protocol has solved the room moving part very well. Any alias of the room has the same validity to be the main room because the content is being stored on all the servers where people joined the room and the room name is just that an alias and you can have many of them pointing to the same room.
  I understand it's more difficult to do with the ActivityPub protocol, but something like that would solve this problem once and for all.

Moved a community over from lemm.ee to Piefed (!monitors@piefed.social). It's going well enough. The community never had all that much engagement, but the content is complementary to the !hardware@lemmy.world community that I mod/curate, so it doesn't require additional time/effort.

!television@piefed.social should make it to 1000 subscribers by tuesday, or wednesday. Also, it's now the most active piefed community and brushing up on the frontpage of active communities per day/week as seen on lemmy.world.