Is creating and maintaining a community on Lemmy hard?

Creating a community is easy. Being the sole content creator and marketing your community until it becomes self-sustaining is very very hard. Moderating it once it becomes sustainable is moderately hard (pun intended)

A community? No, you just gotta be dedicated to starting conversations and promoting it.

An instance though? Can be hit or miss.

Creating a community is super easy.

The initial moderation is also quite easy, though you need to dedicate some time to build the initial userbase and write clear, concise, reasonable rules.

What I can tell you from personal experience though is that maintaining a community after it grows is hard, and time consuming, and you'll absolutely need extra moderators and moderator tools.

Right now, today, on Lemmy no communities are big enough for this to be a concern. However, Reddit also started small. Be prepared.

Maintaining is the hard part. Feels like shouting in the abyss for a while.

Then unfortunately other people start to post as well

It's not difficult but you need perseverance to just get your head down and keep a trickle of content going in the hope that it'll gain momentum. That means you can't worry too much about initially being the only one posting to your community and you should make sure you have your newsfeeds up and running, and well trained, to keep feeding you potentially interesting links. Also keep an eye out for enthusiastic posters who does be potential moderators - as someone on here said: you can make a good poster a mod, you can't make a mod a good poster.

Maintaining a community is never easy

Yeah its hard. Finding interesting stuff to post and the consistency is tough.

Depends on the type of community. I am the PS5 community creator. There is constant news available for discussions but you have to be consistent and patient. For other types of communities it is probably harder to even generate content. It helps to make friends with other mods also if your community has "neighbors" so to speak. For me that would be other console communities and gaming communities.

If you're gonna start something like c/birdswitharms you're probably gonna have a harder time gaining traction.

No not at all

i guess so

I personally post relevant information to the communities I've created and moderate, but I'm not here to be an entertainer. I get a handful of upvotes so I guess it's useful to some people.

If Reddit fucks up even more I might have a bigger role, but so far it pretty feels like that Milhouse GIF playing frisbee with himself, and I'm sort of okay with that.