Proud multicrafter, making cool stuff and all over the Fediverse like a rash. Find my various stuff at https://linksta.cc/@thegiddystitcher
Gamedev alter ego: @TeaHands@lemmy.world
- Posts
- 14
- Comments
- 51
- Joined
- 3 yr. ago
- Posts
- 14
- Comments
- 51
- Joined
- 3 yr. ago
DID YOU KNOW? Knitting isn't just about cosy socks and sweaters in winter, it's also a summer-appropriate activity with cotton yarns, lace patterns, cute home accessories and suchlike.
This has been your knitting community fact of the day.
This turns my tendency to Lemmy while wrapped in a cosy electric blanket into a deep metaphor.
I do appreciate where you're coming from, there. Some people will unfortunately take any opportunity to exclude others.
Glad to hear other folks having positive experiences here too! Idk about you but every single time I've corrected someone for referring to me as "he" on Lemmy, they've actually apologised. Quite the change from Reddit!
Being welcoming to people in general goes without saying. But we're specifically in a thread about encouraging more women to join and making them feel safe to do so.
Woohoo! Get them over here, December is going to be SOCK MONTH it's very exciting haha 😄
I'm a woman, and make no attempt to hide that fact in my posts. That said, I also don't personally have much interest in talking about being a woman, so don't sub to any of those places you linked.
Over on Reddit I just sort of let people assume I was male a lot of the time, since it wasn't really relevant to what we were talking about. But from the start on Lemmy I've made sure to call out incorrect assumptions, downvote and give a talking to people stereotyping or being misogynistic, etc etc. And the more of us (of all genders) that make that same decision, the better things get.
I also mod !knitting@lemmy.world which as you might expect is largely although by no means entirely women. Any questionable comments over there are dealt with swiftly, I am absolutely not having it.
I don't necessarily see it as a "problem" that Lemmy is seemingly male-dominated (I say Lemmy because my Mastodon is very much female-and-NB-dominated). It's more just a fact of early adopters tending to the techy interests that skew male. But if someone does see it as a problem and wants it to change, there are basically two things to do:
- Make sure you're helping make Lemmy a welcoming place for non-males
- Invite your non-male friends
All that said, other women may disagree but I don't particularly feel like a minority on here and never really think about it until coming across something gross (which is a LOT less often than on Reddit, thankfully). There may be few enough women that I recognise their names often when they post, but let's be honest Lemmy is a small world and that goes for most regular posters in general.
(And it helps that I'm middle-aged so if any little boy thinks they can upset me with comments about my gender or appearance or whatever, lol, the self-confidence of age is a wonderful thing 😉)
Edit: Just wanted to add, if you're not a man and you're reading this thinking "wow she's lucky, I've had such a bad experience here" then first, I'm sorry you've had that experience, people suck sometimes. But also, drop me a DM let's see if we've got any interests in common and I can maybe signpost you to some more friendly communities and people. Between my two accounts I spend WAY too much time on Lemmy!
I'm sole mod (not the original creator, but took over when they went awol) for the knitting community at !knitting@lemmy.world, and I do my best to contribute a lot to the cross stitch & embroidery one at !lemmy_stitch@sh.itjust.works too. This is coming from a history of running various niche online groups. So a few things I would advise:
- First, just accept that some topics are too niche. They were too niche for Reddit as well, at one point. People got overexcited and wanted to mark their territory by setting up a ton of communities when they were new to Lemmy, but reality doesn't work that way and a lot of those spaces just aren't needed. We'd be better served combining posts from these into slightly more general combined communities, and perhaps leaving a sticky post in the tiny niche ones letting everyone know where to head to for that topic.
But if your topic is big enough to in theory get decent traction:
- Be grateful for what users you do have. You said you sometimes get "few" replies, so make sure you're getting to know those people and replying to them and continuing the conversation where appropriate. You don't need a lot of users, you just need a few engaged ones to make for a nice community.
- Recruit your friends. You're a Chiefs fan, you probably know other Chiefs fans. Get them interested.
- Drop your community link wherever its relevant. People don't like having to put effort into finding new communities but if they just happen to come across mention of it, they'll click. Obviously I'm not saying spam, but there are plenty of sports fans here and it's bound to come up in conversation.
- Crosspost. Any posts you make to a Chiefs community are probably also relevant to the wider NFL communities or maybe fantasy football players. And again this just gives more people the chance to stumble across the fact that you exist.
Ok these next couple are more involved, but they do work well!
- Consider Mastodon. I have a craft-focused account there too, and if I have a question about knitting or cross stitch or whatever then the more answers I can get the better, right? So I use the fact that we can post from Mastodon, to a Lemmy community, combining the replies from both audiences in one thread. Example of what I mean here.
- Create value. Could be by posting pillar content that's actually useful (in your case could be some kind of statistical analysis, we all know the football nerds love it, but whatever will be long-term useful / interesting to your audience). Or it could be a regular community event or something ("predict the Chiefs wins/losses for the upcoming season and win something, etc etc).
- Ask your existing users what they'd like to see from the community. Some things you try will hit and some will miss, but getting feedback is going to up your chances!
That's everything off the top of my head and it's already a wall of text so I'll stop there. It is absolutely difficult to be a mod, it can be a lot of work to get to the point of just having an active community that doesn't need your input to keep rolling. But if your community see you trying, I think that goes a long way. Hope some of this was helpful!
I make videos that are usually somewhere between 10-20mins long, and I know that video storage really adds up fast. My worry with things like this is that I basically can't afford to donate as much as I would be costing. But maybe there's some kind of relevant info on that somewhere that I just can't immediately see. Definitely worth an investigate, at least!
What does "saving" a song even mean? I'm old and confused
This took me a couple seconds but I'm happy to report that once it clicked it got an out loud "oh my god" from me irl 🤦♀️