this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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Fedigrow
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To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
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Achievement unlocked: "The void has shouted back"!
[email protected] got its first thread and comments by someone who is not me \o/
[email protected] has been chugging along nicely as well. There have been several new threads by other users since I took over as a mod 🎉
Very glad [email protected] has interaction from people that are not me. Hoping to possibly poach some r/otomegames users, though it's not likely thanks to r/otomegames shoving all promotion of other communities into the Self-Promotion Sunday posts nobody looks at. And I still participate on r/otomegames in fear that one day they'll say "too much self-promo of another community, not enough normal community engagement, you are just trying to advertise, off you go!" I did actually use that sub normally before I left Reddit for the Fediverse. Also advertised it in otome Discords I am in.
I think I'm also getting more upvotes, if not engagement, thanks to the home instance being ani.social and otome games being a primarily Japanese genre with even the Western-released games usually following an anime artstyle.
talks about real life gender dynamics, nothing accusatory or All GENDER Does BAD ACTION, but if you are absolutely sick of seeing stuff talking about real life demographic stuff online, you might not want to open it
Frankly, the lack of engagement is… predictable. I'm pretty sure the instance is not all dudes who are interested in women, but judging by the Moe communities posting anime women being the most popular Local communities, and many of the anime-specific communities mainly posting pictures of female characters with comparatively little discussion, ani.social likely has a large male-interested-in-women population (yes, I acknowledge there could be other genders posting that, or people of any demographic who like the art but are not attracted to women). So I'm grateful for their non-destructive engagement with a community aimed at women interested in men.I'm glad such people exist, as a woman interested in men—I'd be very SOL if there were no men interested in women. No bad behavior has occurred so far on the community, and I doubt it will. But unlike real-life male-dominated environments where I feel normal (yes, I'm aware my privileged existence as what, at least online, seems to be one of the few women alive without a harassment or men-being-shitty-in-a-gendered-way story, is the reason I can have this perspective), it actually feels a little weird having one femgaze community on ani.social, where male-gazey communities (and communities that are ostensibly general purpose—for the anime they are named after—but in practice they're often male-gazey too) dominate. I have no issue with male-gazey anime content existing, men deserve a place to release their sexuality in a healthy manner, same as everyone else. (I am also very much taking advantage of the Subscribed-only view so I can avoid the tons of Local content I am uninterested in, which goes a long way towards my tolerant attitude :P I might not be so friendly if I had to see it to use ani.social, the same way people are irritated with otherwise-harmless Linux fans because they want to use Local/All and it's full of Linux posts that they personally are uninterested in.) It just feels weird to be on an instance full of it as a woman disinterested in male-gazey content who is also trying to start a femgazey community on the exact same instance.
(; v ;) I get you, I get you so much...the Threadiverse and Fedi in general seem to lack female-oriented fandom-spaces. It really feels like we're pioneers trying to build everything from the ground up. The good thing is that, since the general purpose-fandom communities are still small as well, we have the opportunity to help shape them! (I have been trying that with the more general visual novel communities, for example).
I personally have been too shy to promote my communities outside of fedi yet... (._.)
It does not help that there were other women when I was initially on
[email protected]but they dropped off eventually and kbin.social is dead. Not sure where they went or if they'll find this place.A silver lining to the otome community being small on the Fediverse is that it is okay to make duplicate communities. I specifically created this community instead of trying to reactivate the inactive [email protected] because frankly the English errors in the sidebar were not a good look, and I wanted a community that could not fall prey to one of my greatest annoyances in online anime-adjacent fandom: the community being all fanart reposts, with little to no discussion or original fanart. [email protected] allowed non-original fanart, [email protected] does not. r/otomegames was more discussion and original fanart than just Pixiv reposts and I really liked that. I liked that a lot and wanted to bring some of that here. (And I also get to be less harsh on self-promoters. I understand not wanting the sub spammed with Discords or daily dev updates but I certainly do not want to chuck new communities in a weekly self-promo post nobody reads, or restrict new devs quite as heavily as r/otomegames does.)