It sucks, but the best way to jumpstart a community is to regularly post into an empty void for a very long time, and let people slowly rely on the consistency and start talking once they have a schedule they can expect.

Which is ass, because you cant know how long that time is of seemingly posting shit for no one, to no one.

I mean, to be fair, in lemmy standards, having 23 people interacting with your post to vote and/or comment is a good sign that the community is visible enough at this point that it should be a short hop to being popular—by Lemmy standards. It’s “dead” in that no one is posting. But you could post if you want to do that work of uploading highlights, dutifully making posts, etc.

That’s where Reddit had a huge benefit. It was well-known enough to be a status symbol while still seen as a kind of mainstream “nerdy” thing. So people committed hours and hours of their lives to building and maintaining their popular accounts. It gave a visible outlet to people that wanted to be into niche stuff, but wanted to be known for being into “interesting” niche topics. It’s the hot topic of websites. “I’m so different, I pay top dollar at The Different Shop.” Reddit offers people that image in return for their labor hours.

Lemmy is just truly niche and unpopular and doesn’t really boost the quirky-cred of anyone (yet). So this is truly a passion-based slog if you want to make a community grow. You have more people with nothing but genuine interest here, but fewer people.

Have to admit that I’ve been lurking on Reddit much more (via Stealth, it scrapes from the old reddit api) and unfrotunately the lack of activity on here kinda made even lurking back on there a superior experience

I get that I should initiate discourse if I want that on here, but man it’s really quiet on here either way

Yeah, experience from moderating over at [email protected] is that you’ve just got to keep posting and posting and posting and gradually, very slowly, the numbers creep up. Same on Mastodon on the #MastodonFC and #COYS tags (can’t speak for other clubs). You’ve got to give people a reason to come back.

Personally, I’m not sure the individual posts containing a single goal from a specific match is helping much. Makes the community seem very noisy. IMO would be better to have one thread per match with goals posted as comments. But I’m not mod here and others may feel differently, so ¯_(ツ)_/¯

FWIW, I don’t see the community as dead. I post a few things here and there’s often a good number of votes and some good discussion. Seems far from dead to me.

Communities last for longer than people’s attention spans.

Get rid of the bot and we’d already be way better off.