If you want your community to grow, there's things you can do to help. Some of them are better than others. What are things that are good for the Fediverse, and what are some things that are better left on other platforms? Here's a few things and my opinions
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Clickbaity titles ("Liberals DESTROYED by LOGIC") - No thank you.
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Consistent posting - Yes. If you start a community, you'll probably be the only one posting on there for a while. It's easier to bootstrap a community if it's something that comes with content ready-to-go somehow to make your job easier.
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GIFs - I've been using this over in !observances@midwest.social. That's about as growth-hacky as I'd like to get, but I'm pretty sure people are more likely to engage with animated GIFs than static images for communities like that.
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Sources - I think this is something that can differentiate the Fediverse from other platforms. On my posts in !outofcontextcomics@lemmy.world, I've been spending time to source everything before posting it. This makes sure I don't accidentally post edited images that I've seen over in /r/outofcontextcomics, and makes the Fediverse show up in searches. That actually probably hurts growth a little bit, but IMO is worth it
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Transcribing - Another differentiator for the Fediverse. Everything's been done by hand and it's been great. I've been transcribing my posts in !outofcontextcomics@lemmy.world and I've been very happy to see that search engines are already picking those up.
Not knocking you, but that's a lot of work for little to no reward. Once it starts feeling like work, I stop. The point for me, is that it's for fun once it stops being that, or if, then kinda like, why am I doing this for?
The Down Voting
This to me at least, defeats the purpose of doing extensive 'work' for posting in communities. Especially when, lemmy has a specific audience: political, techy, anime, videos games, computing, u get the idea.
In my view, fedi/lemmy not having mainstream or normie appeal, it won't really grow. Factor in heavy handed politcal ideological admining/moderation, you have to ask yourself, who would want to see that all the time and deal with that all the time, when they can just put in a #memes hashtag on X, mewe, Facebook, instagram, or threads, and also post pretty much whatever they want, (Their opinions, food, pets, random life stuff) without having to deal with community rules or some politically motivated 'mod'.
Why do u think they're r like almost zero reddit alternatives? Most ppl aren't interested in forums and the way they operate. Ppl like it easy and simple
Id like for lemmy to grow and be much more diverse in terms of users. Content, opinions, but sadly that just will never happen. And i think it's meant/intended to be that way. A left leaning space which does not want any outsiders or anything or anyone mainstream.
There's also too many passive users and too many lurkers. If u want a social media site/app to succeed, u need The content creators and active users. Those are the users who are going to bring more ppl.
But lemmy is not that.
Most users are far too politically extreme, only lurk, remove what they don't agree with or like, ban ppl left and right (Dissinsentivizing activity) and down vote pretty much any and everything that isn't the core content. (Anime, left wing politics, computing and tech)