I created !pixelart@retrolemmy.com a few days ago. It started with 55 default sub's from Lemmy-federate bots, but now already has 200 subs, and users participating with their own art!

Quite pleased with the community response, and grateful to retrolemmy.com for hosting it. They were the perfect instance for that community, and seem to run a tight ship :)

[–] DosDude@retrolemmy.com 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

We mostly try to keep the server running, and let people be people. Not much admin work to do on a small instance. Thankfully. But we're happy to have you!

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Don't sell yourselves short, your instance has a lot going for it due to your efforts!

Active admins who regularly participate and are easily reached if issues come up
Regularly update to newer versions of Lemmy
Appealing instance theme
excellent server up-time
Sought out Lemmy-federate to make it easier for new communities

All that takes time and effort to maintain, and a surprising amount of smaller instances can lack that. So cheers for all that you do, appreciate it man :)

[–] DosDude@retrolemmy.com 2 points 2 weeks ago

Haha. Thanks a lot! Even though most of it is due to self interest :p

[–] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Thanks! That's a cool community, we're happy to have you

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It started with 55 default sub’s from Lemmy-federate bots

Huh!
So... how does that work, if I might ask?
You can start a community and somehow assign dozens of bots to it, instantly pumping up the numbers, so to speak...?

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Lemmy-Federate is a project that automatically subscribes a single bot account from participating instances to essentially pre-seed a community across those instances. The net effect of doing that is posts made to that community will show up on those instances /all feed, and the community itself will show up if users on those instances search it (instead of having to use the lemmyverse.net community search to discover it exists, and then manually federate the community to their instance by searching the community URL in their local instance's search bar).

Once a real user from a participating instance subscribes to the community, the bot account will unsubscribe.

It makes it much, much easier to get a new community rolling, as otherwise it could take quite some time for people across instances to discover it and be federated naturally (which is even more of an issue on smaller instances, where there may not be a large/active local community to kick things off).

[–] JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Pardon the late reply, and wow, sounds interesting. As well as hugely practical. oO
Thanks for the extensive reply!

I wish I could say I understood this 'bot' stuff better. For example, it seems some instances allow the creation and auto-administration of bot accounts, but I don't think mine does (lemm.ee). It sounds like for other instances, though, that's something of a feature.

To be clear-- the goal for my community would be to have a scheduled bot drip daily or semi-daily content, freeing me up to work on longer-form pieces.

There was in fact a 3rd-party tool that worked exactly that way for a while, but it seems it eventually broke due to a key update by the Lemmy software.