Fedigrow

My regular posting on !sumo@lemmy.world is coming to an end for the moment!

• For newcomers, the deal is: every 2 months Japan has its national sumo tournament, and I only really follow sumo then. So it seemed like a great low-risk opportunity to build the community. I've been posting links to recap videos every day of the tournament (which lasts 15 days) and now that the tournament's over, I can take a break until the next tournament.
• A lot of these posts were links to youtube videos, and making sure the posts have thumbnails is always a challenge. (personally I think the posts look kinda boring without thumbnails, so it's kind of a personal challenge where I just try to figure it out, it's not a big deal really.) Anyway, I was posting the youtube links on slrpnk.net and making custom thumbnails, and the custom thumbnails showed up on both slrpnk.net and lemmy.world but nowhere else. But then lemmy.world uprgraded their instance, and the thumbnails no longer federated! So I made a lemmy.world alt (which was an adventure in itself) and started making the posts from there, so the lemmy.world masses saw the thumbnails, and slrpnk.net saw automatically-generated youtube thumbnails (for some reason?) Same on Jerboa IF I'm signed in. But if I'm NOT signed in, there are no thumbnails on Jerboa or other instances like https://lemm.ee/c/sumo@lemmy.world . So its basically impossible to guarantee thumbnails for links to youtube videos fediverse-wide. Apparently this is a know bug.
• Next tournament I'm thinking of making a "daily videos" image post. Those all propagate, and having an image is great bc sumo is a real visual sport. Then the body of the post will have links to all the different available videos: offical videos with English commentary (great but they come out with a 1-day delay), links to collections of official videos in Japanese, links to fan-made "best fights of the day" summaries, etc. The frequent posters on !thrashmetal@lemmy.world do something similar: an image post with body-links to the song in question.
• Weirdly, https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/sumo@lemmy.world doesn't have the most recent posts, but I dunno I'm not gonna worry about it for another 2 months. (see how that works?)

Anyway, this tournament we went from 47 subscribers to 80 (plus my one alt), so that's pratty good for a niche sub. Let's see how we do next tournament two month from now! Ganbarimasu! (I'll do my best!)