Honestly this was on my mind because I saw a clickbait YT title the other day claiming that the creator had one chance to do a thing or would have to “be a janitor forever” which…a) that’s ridiculous and b) doesn’t sound half bad to me at all 🤷‍♀️

I’ve done all kinds of random jobs but like to tell anyone who will listen that my time as a cleaner was possibly the best of them all.

I worked in a building that was entirely dedicated to operating and adminning a traffic tunnel, so there were normal office rooms but also cool control rooms full of flashing lights and interesting displays and friendly people who were only too happy to infodump about it all.

The top floor was entirely given over to a conference room featuring a massive scale model of our tunnel but also the surrounding road system, complete with tiny toy cars. That room also had a hot drinks machine that was entirely free to employees so most of my breaks were spent up there with a book drinking hot chocolate.

Yeah, cleaning toilets and buffing floors is not exactly going to keep your mind occupied, but that just means it’s free to wander to more interesting places. No stress, nothing to take home at the end of the day.

If you can get by on the generally lower pay and get to clean somewhere interesting there are a lot of unexpected perks, tbh.

As much as I love Lemmy, it’s just honestly not ready for another big influx yet. The 0.19 update broke so much, it really brought home how precarious this whole thing still is. Those of us who are here either a) kind of enjoy the jank because it feels like an adventure b) were morally outraged enough to make a stand against Reddit or c) both.

I have a very small amount of influence in the niche community of fibre crafts and especially cross stitch. Would I be able to explain Lemmy to my audience in a way that made sense and that they might even want to try out? Absolutely. Would I actually do that until it’s a bit more stable? Absolutely not, apart from a couple of specific individuals that I’m already working on.

Trying to force people to join platform B when platform A is already serving their needs makes no sense. You need to find the people who are dissatisfied, the people that would actually benefit from trying something new, and then make sure they’re aware of the option.

Don’t get me wrong through, I do encourage people to learn about and dip their toes into the Fediverse in general. Just last week I convinced a wave of fibre crafters (often older ladies who have barely ever ventured outside of Facebook) to try out Mastodon and Pixelfed and some of them have really taken to it! Alt text and content warnings and everything! One or two fellow YouTubers are even setting up PeerTube channels to bring over more crafting content.

Why did I tell them to join Mastodon over Lemmy? I’m literally moderator of !knitting@lemmy.world and !lemmy_stitch@sh.itjust.works so surely it’s in my best interests to bring them over here?

No. I know the demographic, I know what they’re annoyed about with big social media, and I thought Mastodon / Pixelfed were the best replacements for them.

As much as we would all love to see Lemmy become huge, you have to meet people where they’re at. If Lemmy is genuinely the best choice for everyone who is currently in /r/adelaide or whatever, then brilliant, your strategy makes sense. But if it’s not actually in their best interests, if they’re just going to be annoyed by things breaking and not see enough value to make it worthwhile, then there’s no point doing it just because you wish Lemmy was bigger.

Maybe the moral of this story is that the real strategy you want to be looking at is getting tiny niche influencers on side! 😄

Some tips for this, as someone who does it all the time:

• Tag a Lemmy community like you would a Mastodon user to get this to work, for example @til@lemmy.world, BUT…
• The first line of your toot becomes the post title, so don’t put any links or tag the community in that first line. Newer versions of Lemmy can strip out links but it still ends up looking weird. Looks best if you do something like the example below.
• You can only post to one community, trying to tag multiple will post to the first one and ignore the rest
• The first image attached to your toot becomes the Lemmy post image, but subsequent images get left behind
• If your Mastodon instance has AUTHORIZED_FETCH turned on and the Lemmy community you’re trying to post to isn’t on 0.19 yet, it won’t work at all. In theory this should be fixed when more servers upgrade but we’ll see.

Example toot format

This is my title, with nothing weird in it.

Rest of the toot goes here and will become the post body. This format will look nice on both Mastodon and Lemmy therefore not making anyone unreasonably mad at you.

@community and #Hashtags

Thank you.

I cannot for the life of me figure out what this actually is. But congrats on building it and yay for more federated stuff!

Glad to hear other folks having positive experiences here too! Idk about you but every single time I’ve corrected someone for referring to me as “he” on Lemmy, they’ve actually apologised. Quite the change from Reddit!

Being welcoming to people in general goes without saying. But we’re specifically in a thread about encouraging more women to join and making them feel safe to do so.

Woohoo! Get them over here, December is going to be SOCK MONTH it’s very exciting haha 😄

I’m a woman, and make no attempt to hide that fact in my posts. That said, I also don’t personally have much interest in talking about being a woman, so don’t sub to any of those places you linked.

Over on Reddit I just sort of let people assume I was male a lot of the time, since it wasn’t really relevant to what we were talking about. But from the start on Lemmy I’ve made sure to call out incorrect assumptions, downvote and give a talking to people stereotyping or being misogynistic, etc etc. And the more of us (of all genders) that make that same decision, the better things get.

I also mod !knitting@lemmy.world which as you might expect is largely although by no means entirely women. Any questionable comments over there are dealt with swiftly, I am absolutely not having it.

I don’t necessarily see it as a “problem” that Lemmy is seemingly male-dominated (I say Lemmy because my Mastodon is very much female-and-NB-dominated). It’s more just a fact of early adopters tending to the techy interests that skew male. But if someone does see it as a problem and wants it to change, there are basically two things to do:

1. Make sure you’re helping make Lemmy a welcoming place for non-males
2. Invite your non-male friends

All that said, other women may disagree but I don’t particularly feel like a minority on here and never really think about it until coming across something gross (which is a LOT less often than on Reddit, thankfully). There may be few enough women that I recognise their names often when they post, but let’s be honest Lemmy is a small world and that goes for most regular posters in general.

(And it helps that I’m middle-aged so if any little boy thinks they can upset me with comments about my gender or appearance or whatever, lol, the self-confidence of age is a wonderful thing 😉)

Edit: Just wanted to add, if you’re not a man and you’re reading this thinking “wow she’s lucky, I’ve had such a bad experience here” then first, I’m sorry you’ve had that experience, people suck sometimes. But also, drop me a DM let’s see if we’ve got any interests in common and I can maybe signpost you to some more friendly communities and people. Between my two accounts I spend WAY too much time on Lemmy!

I’m sole mod (not the original creator, but took over when they went awol) for the knitting community at !knitting@lemmy.world, and I do my best to contribute a lot to the cross stitch & embroidery one at !lemmy_stitch@sh.itjust.works too. This is coming from a history of running various niche online groups. So a few things I would advise:

• First, just accept that some topics are too niche. They were too niche for Reddit as well, at one point. People got overexcited and wanted to mark their territory by setting up a ton of communities when they were new to Lemmy, but reality doesn’t work that way and a lot of those spaces just aren’t needed. We’d be better served combining posts from these into slightly more general combined communities, and perhaps leaving a sticky post in the tiny niche ones letting everyone know where to head to for that topic.

But if your topic is big enough to in theory get decent traction:

• Be grateful for what users you do have. You said you sometimes get “few” replies, so make sure you’re getting to know those people and replying to them and continuing the conversation where appropriate. You don’t need a lot of users, you just need a few engaged ones to make for a nice community.

• Recruit your friends. You’re a Chiefs fan, you probably know other Chiefs fans. Get them interested.

• Drop your community link wherever its relevant. People don’t like having to put effort into finding new communities but if they just happen to come across mention of it, they’ll click. Obviously I’m not saying spam, but there are plenty of sports fans here and it’s bound to come up in conversation.

• Crosspost. Any posts you make to a Chiefs community are probably also relevant to the wider NFL communities or maybe fantasy football players. And again this just gives more people the chance to stumble across the fact that you exist.

Ok these next couple are more involved, but they do work well!

• Consider Mastodon. I have a craft-focused account there too, and if I have a question about knitting or cross stitch or whatever then the more answers I can get the better, right? So I use the fact that we can post from Mastodon, to a Lemmy community, combining the replies from both audiences in one thread. Example of what I mean here.

• Create value. Could be by posting pillar content that’s actually useful (in your case could be some kind of statistical analysis, we all know the football nerds love it, but whatever will be long-term useful / interesting to your audience). Or it could be a regular community event or something ("predict the Chiefs wins/losses for the upcoming season and win something, etc etc).

• Ask your existing users what they’d like to see from the community. Some things you try will hit and some will miss, but getting feedback is going to up your chances!

That’s everything off the top of my head and it’s already a wall of text so I’ll stop there. It is absolutely difficult to be a mod, it can be a lot of work to get to the point of just having an active community that doesn’t need your input to keep rolling. But if your community see you trying, I think that goes a long way. Hope some of this was helpful!