this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
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Fedigrow
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To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
Resources:
- https://lemmy-federate.com/ to federate your community to a lot of instances
- !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com to organize overall fediverse growth
- !reddit@lemmy.world to keep tabs on where new users might come from :)
- !newcommunities@lemmy.world
- !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
- https://lemvotes.org/
Megathreads:
- How (and when) to consolidate communities? (A guide)
- Where to request inactive or unmoderated communities? (A list)
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!football@sopuli.xyz is okay, but we could definitely benefit from a few more posters/commenters
Just reposted it on !newcommunities@lemmy.world because why not
Does this mean you won't mind me posting the communities from the topic-specific instances, even if they are not exactly new?
While I can't speak for the mods there, I can confirm that it's cool to post old communities on !communitypromo@lemmy.ca :)
Just FYI, I now use mostly !newcommunities@lemmy.world as Piefed parses that community to fetch new communities: https://chat.piefed.social/#narrow/channel/4-developers/topic/Lemmyverse.20Community.20Discovery/near/4966
I would have preferred to use the lemmy.ca community for that, but the Piefed devs preferred to use the community with the most subs
Wait, so the posts that are showing up on !newcommunities@lemmy.world are not really initiated by the user, but just the piefed server creating a post and impersonating the user that created the community?
@rimu@piefed.social, if I'm understanding this correctly, it's the second feature (the first one being the import of communities) where you have the server initiating actions but misrepresenting the true actor.
There is a checkbox in the communicaty creation menu that allows you to indeed create a post on !newcommunities at creation
It's funny to see these contrasting approaches between PieFed and Lemmy development.
Rimu just treats this is a hobby and goes ahead yolo'ing a bunch of these features that abuse the underlying protocol and could bring serious systemic risks if other admins start deploying it, but because the current userbase is small then there is little scrutiny and they all think it's good to go.
The Lemmy devs are trying for years to get enough support to make a living of their work and therefore a lot more "professional" about what they do, so they would never introduce a feature that could cause Lemmy to be a "bad participant" in the network. But by not taking a more "customer-focused" approach to product development, it takes a long time to bring any functionality that makes it attractive.
PieFed is definitely taking a "Worse is Better" approach and I don't know what to make of it. It seems to be poised to make it most popular software among the current fediverse users, but at the same time it makes so idiosyncratic decisions that it makes it hard to believe it will be usable if more people started joining in.
pay me.
You think that if I paid you to remove features, you'd do it?
No, but if I was paid it wouldn't be a hobby.
Before launching the feature I checked with the mod of that community to see if they were ok with it. We agreed to try it and see if it caused any problems. If it does I'll point the code at a different community instead, possibly a PieFed one.
If that is still a problem then I'll code something to spread communities to other instances using an API but that seems like a lot more work.
Wouldn't you agree that hardcoding one specific community to provide a feature to "try it and see it causes any problems" is yolo'ing?
In my view, the "proper" solution to this (and that would fit right into ActivityPub) would be simply to let the actor that represents the server to post "as:Create" for any new communities that are created and then let the other software follow these if they are interested.
It certainly would be a lot more work and it would still require others to write code on their end to look for this information, but seems like the only implementation that would seem like just another ad-hoc hack.
No and I reject your characterization of the situation.
Every feature is a tradeoff between risk, effort, benefits for various stakeholders. I do my best to balance those and am always listening to feedback.
Seems accurate. This example is a good one: if you create a community and want it to succeed, you are going to promote it on !newcommunities@lemmy.world. Or maybe you aren't aware of !newcommunities, because you are a now mod, but then it's still useful to have that there.
On the other hand, I'm see newcommunities being flooded with posts from piefed.social and thinking the following:
Well, sure, but that's still the most active community on that topic. And I know because I've been trying to push for !communitypromo@lemmy.ca for years, without success.
The feature is available for any Piefed instance, there are currently 13 with more than 10 monthly active users: https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list
Edit: also, Piefed has an instance chooser, if you click on Register, you end up on this page: https://piefed.zip/auth/instance_chooser
Oh nice! I haven't had a chance to explore the new features yet. While I wouldn't want to change it for piefed.ca, it might be nice in the future if instances were able to customize which community it uses. For the users/instances that block LW/that community
Indeed. Down the line, hopefully we won't rely on a community but rather on raw data from instances themselves, the current setup is quite of a workaround