If you create a community, please try and populate it with content. I see a lot of new communities with 0-1 posts from the mod. That's not nearly enough to get people engaged - users are going to see that it's a ghost town and leave.

If you have enough interest to create a community, you probably know something about the subject matter, so PLEASE add some posts (5-10 would be a good start). Maybe some questions to get people talking, even popular reposts from other sites. It sucks shouting into a void, but if you don't do it, everyone else will also be shouting into a void.

Also please consider whether you need to create a community! When there are 100 million users of the site, there may be 1000 people who are interested in the same exact niche tabletop RPG as you, but there are <500,000 users here for now, so you'll be lucky to find 10. Consider creating a thread in a broader community (like boardgames) until you have enough people talking in the thread that it gets messy - then it's time to create a separate community.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Rules

The rules may be more established as time goes on, but it's important to have a foundation to work on.

1. Follow the rules of Lemmy.world - These rules are the same as Mastodon.world's rules, which can be found here.

2. Include a community title and description in your post title. - A following example of this would be New Communities - A place to post new communities all over Lemmy for discovery and promotion.

3. Follow the formatting. - The formatting as included below is important for people getting universal links across Lemmy as easily as possible.

Formatting

Please include this following format in your post:

[link text](/c/community@instance.com)

This provides a link that should work across instances, but in some cases it won't

You should also include either:

!community@instance.com

or instance.com/c/community

FAQ:

Q: Why do I get a community not found message?

A: At least one user in an instance needs to search for a community before it gets fetched. Searching for the community will bring it into the instance and it will fetch a few of the most recent posts without comments. If a user is subscribed to a community, then all of the future posts and interactions are now in-sync.

*Q: Why isn't the link working on kbin.social?"

A: This is a community for Lemmy, there is a universal link for Lemmy, but when this universal link works on kbin. It turns out like the below.

https://kbin.social/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world/

Simply replace the c with an m for kbin.social like shown below.

https://kbin.social/m/newcommunities@lemmy.world/

*Q: When I try to create a post, the circle just spins forever. Why is that? *

A: (This may be removed soon as it is seems to be happening less often now.) This is a current known issue with large communities. Sometimes it does get posted, but just continues spinning, but sometimes it doesn't get posted and continues spinning. If it doesn't actually get posted, the best thing to do is try later. However, only some people seem to be having this problem at the moment.

Cross-Posting

On Lemmy you can use the the built in cross post function to link viewers of one post to another. This lets users quickly see what people in other communities are saying and also has the potential to expose someone to something new. For community owners this is a great way to go about seeding discussion in new communities.

Example:

Thanks to this post and creator for this tip!

Active = 1 post in the last seven days

Active - 1 post last week

Active = at least 1 post last week