I've been posting creative OC for ages because I enjoy it. It's great to have people bounce their own creativity back. I don't need an audience of millions.
Recently I started doing commissions, which means that the stuff I'm posting is also being paid for, which is nice. It doesn't change my desire to post my stuff for the sake of it.
Ideas are great - but execution is king. Because execution is where most of your creativity actually makes a difference in how the idea is represented. If you have a good idea and a good execution, it's very hard for someone to take that away from you. If you have a good idea, but execute it poorly, someone taking that idea and executing it better will leave you in the dust. But without the better execution that wouldn't work.
Better execution isn't always fair though - we often start out in life being unable to compete because of lack of experience, financing, and publicity. But it's basically how the entire entertainment industry works. Everyone just shuffles ideas around, and try to execute it better (or different enough) from the previous time the idea made the rounds.
After finding good ideas, get people hooked on your execution, and they will not be able to get that anywhere else unless someone else comes along and does it even better, but with practice that can also be you.
Or, as what happened with me, people start to notice your work and stuff gets popular and you get real chances of earning money and getting jobs from it but you buckle under the pressure you put on yourself and end up killing your creativity. It's been almost a decade and I'm still unable to make things as I did before.
I feel this deeply. When I have been really depressed, it is like all my creativity has drained out of me, and I second guessed even boiling water when I am actually an amazing cook. I am very lucky my mom likes to cook with me (she calls herself my sous chef, so sweet) and put up with affirming me almost continually for awhile when we cooked together. I hope I never end up back there; dark times. Having a therapist has also really helped. I hope you find a way back to your creativity. It may never be quite the same, but I promise it can be great again in a new way. Baby steps, not giant leaps.
I was thinking about this last night. I would never have bothered to make this much content for a place like Reddit or Facebook as there is just too much attention on other things. Over the last year I've spent who knows how much time making, finding, and editing content on here and engaging people to try to keep their attention. It's nice in that I feel heard, but it's also such a small crowd, I notice when people show up and start participating, but also when they stop participating. I've built a pretty big following for Lemmy. I'm currently juuuuust not making the first page of biggest communities, but I feel I'm doing well for a niche community here. But the given number of regular commentors I get feels like it hasn't increased over the last 9 months. As soon as I get new people that comment and participate, the same number drop off. It just feels like I'm not getting anywhere, and it makes me question this as a platform. I've got about a half dozen people I'd call regulars, and new people pop in and out, but if I stop to think about the effort in, I wonder how much minimum user feedback I can get by with to do this another whole year.
My current goal is to make it to December and do the Superbowl Owl of the Year Tournament again. That was a huge boost to the community for those few weeks, but that was a toooon of effort to do by myself. Thankfully someone usually chimes in with some positivity and has a very enthusiastic response to something I've shared that can boost my morale, but it really is tough to keep putting work into what many times feels like a void. I always make sure to thank commentors for saying nice things or just participating, because I wouldn't keep doing this without them. I always tell anyone who listens the commentors are just as important as the posters because you won't have one without the other.
I hope for great success for everyone on Lemmy as a platform, but we all need to always try to be more active than we are if that's going to happen. Just post a "I really enjoyed this! Thanks so much for sharing!" once every day or so if you don't feel you have anything topical to add to a post you enjoyed. I know it means a lot to me to see that on my work, and I'm sure it does to most posters. Even when I just share a picture, I may have spent an hour scrolling to find you that pic, verify it's not AI or stolen, and find a little fact or something to add to the post, It's a really quick and easy way to do a nice thing to show someone that made something for your enjoyment that it reached someone.
Hey, I think I saw you post on that "how to get a bit more of positivity" conversation recently. I make a post there listing a bunch of communities that were not news, memes, or tech. And I realized that most of them were powered by a single person. So they'd often have a reasonable number of upvotes, and occasional discussion, but a single person would do all/most of the posting.
That's probably not a good thing. I mean, if a specific dozen people left lemmy, we'd be left with only news, memes, and tech communities. And you're talking about some of the pressures that can make these "community drivers" leave. I can think of a couple possible solutions:
help those community drivers to find backups or co-drivers
let people know that it's OK to just take over a dormant community and start posting
I did see you had Superbowl on your list and I'm always happy to see other people promote it. It's big enough now that I've slowed down promoting it myself so I don't seem pushy. It's been a ton of work, but it's with it to know it makes people a little happier each day.
News, memes, and tech do seem pretty dominating here, and while it's nice getting notification of all that stuff in one place, I still prefer to go to actual news sites I trust. If I spend too much time doing it here, I feel I read more comments than actual articles, and half the comments seem to be made before actually reading the article, so it's easy to get misinformed or biased opinions rather than facts
I've not sought out any direct help for a few reasons. The primary reason is my content is all stuff that I like. It's a labor of love and not a job. I share what I do because I like it and I think you might like it too. If I asked someone to help me out, I'd feel like they're working for me and trying to post what I'd want, but what they'd want. Bigger projects like the long articles and Owl of the Year are also my personal vision, and honestly, I want those done exactly my way, so again, I don't want to make someone else carry out my vision and be frustrated if they can't do that
Also, I feel the people that create the communities should be more active in their actual management. I didn't start Superbowl, so I'm just a guest. I share my stuff and try to make it a better place, and that's the end of my role. Earlier on, I thought it might be better to join with Birding or some other community, or maybe instead start a Raptors community where I could also do hawks, eagles, vultures, etc. Superbowl had a good bit of Reddit momentum, which I believe helped make things self-sustaining faster than for some other communities. I think combining small groups would be the way to go for a lot of things, but that isn't my call.
Ultimately for growth though, it can't be a daily responsibility for anyone. Maybe if you had a group of 5-10 people that can post daily, like those big politics, news, tech groups do, but most communities would be better served by 30 people posting 1 things a month than 1 person posting 30 things a month. It makes it diverse, and that will pull in more people as the flavor of the group will be less one note, and losing one or 2 people doesn't hurt the group as much.
As much as you like my content, their might be some that like different things than me. Like I don't enjoy many of the really small owls as much. When I do post them, many love them, but I don't post them much because they don't interest me. If someone that did love them shared them passionately, that would invigorate that group more than I could. Also, if you didn't like my writing style or if I just write too much or too little, a handful of people writing in their own voice would be great.
I do think some instances have communities to try and get inactive communities into new hands, but if they're dead, they're probably not big enough to be self-sustaining. I see you post to a few music communities, but it would probably be easier and reach more eyes if they were under a broader scope than synthwave and gothic industrial. People on here seem to have great interest in music discovery in a way that humans can do that algorithms can't. Perhaps having a broader scope where you can say, hey if you like "popular song x" you should check out "under the radar song y" that might get more attention. I'm into music creation and synths more than most random people, and I couldn't tell you what electronic music is in what genre, so my chance of stumbling on one of those posts is small at this point even though I'm much closer to your audience. But the principals of being defederated from other groups seems to fly in the face of people seeing they're not getting traffic, reaching out to each other, and merging control of their communities.
But I think that's necessary. Just about all of us probably stumbled upon an already established and powerful state of Reddit, where we didnt need to put in as much work to get eyes. We could jump in a sub with thousands or millions of eyes already on it. We don't have that power here yet. But we're also small enough but large enough you can get a following relatively quick if you do put in the work.
This is getting long, and I've probably given you a bit to think about, so I'll leave it here for now. It's given me some things to think about too but having to type out my thoughts. We all want Lemmy to be big and great, but it's gotta occur naturally. We can't force it. We've got to look and experiment and see what works and what doesn't. Evolution doesn't happen in one generation, it takes many trials and errors. We've just got to keep at making this place the best we can and the rest will follow when it's time.
Related: the mod of !movies recently posted a request for an additional mod/poster. This is the sort of the thing that community "drivers" should do rather than just walking away, but I think sometimes they just walk away.
It would seem better to pass the torch than leave things in a state where nobody knows if you're on vacation or dead or what. I hope he finds someone, the movie category seems like it could be a vibrant one.
I know there's also a few of them. I have them grouped in a multi community to let me browse them all at once. That's been a big help for dealing with fragmented fan bases.
There’s a very common pattern of “I’m going to focus more on my own life” you get from creators as they realize this.
The financial equation of having talent and using it for free stuff for people on the internet is not a stable one. Even when you decide your reward is attention, the mental toll ends up outweighing that meager reward.
I do the reading and research required to make my posts for myself, but the time spent to turn that into a good post is not insignificant. The sharing is to try to build up Lemmy as a community, and to try to help save other people time doing the learning that I've done. It's an act of giving of my time to try to make a positive change in others' lives. It's a voluntary personal sacrifice, and just seeing some happy responses is all I hope to get. It isn't for people to sing my praises, but to receive a positive comment in return is what shows me that I'm not throwing my work into an empty void and just wasting my time. It's the only feedback we get here, and I think we should all give more feedback to the posts we enjoy if we wish to keep getting them. I feel that is a very fair price to pay for free content.
It feels so strange when I see it as someone who has only ever lurked online and is pretty quiet in person. I liked what I saw when I came here, and wanted it to succeed, and making this a place where people actually converse is the only way to be viable. I can't make anyone else post or comment, so I just started to do it myself. Sometimes we have to put our natural comfort zone aside to do what we feel needs to be done.
I love your posts, anon, and you said something similar in another post, which made me stop lurking and start at least commenting. I too want Lemmy to succeed, partially because I need my daily dose of owl knowledge! Please keep rocking on with your bad self.
I do really appreciate getting to give you guys a smile every day with something fun. I dabble in other comment sections, but so much news seems negative, I mainly try to keep a bit of positivity flowing.
I'm glad you got motivated to participate. I had to fake some enthusiasm to make things every day early on, but now that it's become a habit I look forward to and I've gotten familiar with a number of you, it's something I really look forward to doing.
I regularly scout to see what people miss from Reddit, etc and I saw a post the other day saying there is a sub that would read research papers together and I thought that would be really helpful as I've branched out into trying to ELI5 owl research for you guys. I hope that person can stumble onto that and maybe participate. It's fun to see where we'll go with Lemmy.
If you keep commenting and upvoting, I'll keep posting. I'm already looking forward to this year's Owl of the Year. It was so hectic for me, but we all seemed to have a ton of fun!
I am definitely enjoying actually interacting with other users, so I thank you very much for the push to do so. I can very much appreciate the difficultly of staying engaged the way you do, but I also adore the oasis of awesome you have created. No matter what, please know you have brought a ton of happiness to others. What else is better in life, especially when you are also teaching others important things? I've made a fulfilling career out of it irl, and I hope to find ways to do the same on this platform.
It's also great to know it is meaningful to posters to get little comments of appreciation, so I also really appreciate your comments concerning that. You are awesome, and I can wait for the next Owl of the Year tournament! This time I certainly won't just vote, but they are all so lovely, it's hard to pick a favorite!
Everyone said it was hard to pick between 2 great owls, but I had to narrow it down to 32 out of 250! 😵💫
I'm glad I'm able to entertain, educate, and motivate you. I do really feel that it is a team effort for us to succeed as a platform. I have a bunch more great stuff on deck for you guys, so keep checking back!
Oh wow, didn't think about that! Hopefully you can make space in the next competition for some of the ones we missed. Or maybe have a losers' competition... That's what my grandma was all about on super bowl. Any one who didn't win anything in my grandpa's score board got put it a loser's pot that meant everybody ended up with something. To make things not be so much work for you, just have an original didn't make the actual bowl group that people pare down, then add in the losers from the real bowl and see what happens?
I'd be happy to take some of the work off you, but I have only made one actual post because as soon as I got to the image part of posting I peaced out. Sigh. But I'm sure I could figure it out! Of course, I get if you want to do it all.
You are totally right about Lemmy being a team effort. That is why I am here. I'm an excellent team player as long as I can believe I am educating and validating others. Trying to pay forward what I experienced as a child that has been a fountain of opportunity for me.
