With possumpat.io going offline soon, I figured it’s worth talking about where to move what little content gets posted here. There’s Gundam and Gunpla comms on both world and Blåhaj, but they’re pretty dead with inactive mods. The logical home would seem to be ani.social, but there’s no existing comm there.

I have zero interest in being a mod. Dunno if anyone else wants to give it a whirl, or if there are active comms I missed. The other option is to just be a very small minority in the general anime comms. Which is probably the logical choice, just kind of a bummer since Gundam is very much its own thing at this point. Huge in the grand scheme of things, but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of overlap with the general Lemmy demographic.

  • NineSwords@ani.social
    3·
    9 days ago

    Hey there, I’ve gone through a similar problem as @[email protected] mentioned.

    I’ve run the LightNovel community on the .ml instance, which was basically dead, and for a year, it was for the most part just me posting each and every week into the void about what I’ve read and me trying to drum up support for it over on Reddit. During this time I’ve got told a few times that I should migrate to a different instance since this was a bad place on .ml but, you know, I’ve invested time into that community, and there were a few people every now and then that I didn’t want to lose. But after thinking about it for a long while, I decided to migrate to [email protected] where the reception was a lot better by comparison. We’re not exactly exploding in popularity or anything but at least there I feel like part of the group and not some outcast who dared to crash the party. If I needed help I got users reach out to me offering it. A very special thanks to [@I2jgwh0hYtxrCZQ @lemmy.sdf.org](https://lemmy.sdf.org/u/I2jgwh0hYtxrCZQ and @[email protected] who really got out of their way to help me time and again. Trust me, when coming from a dead community on an instance that doesn’t want you that a huge thing.

    Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I think moving communities can be a great decision and that it’s important to move somewhere where the community can belong. I can’t speak for @[email protected] but I guess that GunPla is something that wouldn’t be misplace on ani.social.

    Next is about modding. Let me tell you that in almost a year so far there hasn’t been a single instance where I had to mod anything. One time someone posted a Chinese or Korean light novel and I pointed that out that this is for Japanese light novels only but looking back on it now I feel like that was an clear error on my part. If I had just done nothing it would have been better and might have grown the community instead of pushing someone away. I don’t expect that a GunPla community would explode to such popularity that it would take much work to mod it.

    The other side is the content. I don’t see this as mod work necessarily but just having a community existing doesn’t mean that people will come and fill it up with content. For the most part it will be up to you to fill it up and make it someplace users might be interested to visit. That’s where I’m struggling with the most to be honest. I tried to speed things up with several community building hacks like a discord server and hosting a Minecraft instance but nothing really took off. I think just posting content is the best way to go. I’m not versed enough into GunPla to know how much news/content/discussion there is. It’s something you’ll have to decide on your own if you’re willing to invest that much time into it. Until there’s some resonance it will feel very soul crushing, I can tell you that much.

    Whatever you decide to do with your community, feel free to hit me up if you have any question. Best of luck.

    • MelodiousFunk@slrpnk.netOP
      2·
      9 days ago

      Hey, thanks for the insight. I’ve tried to do the content-posting routine and at this point I think it’s just a numbers/demographics thing. Just seems too niche for Lemmy’s current user base. There seem to be only a handful of us.

      I’m not against moving instances at all - in fact it’s kind of required in this case since the server is getting shut down. Ani.social seems to be the best bet. I agree that not much modding seems necessary for these smaller comms, hell pretty much all of the Gundam comms are free-range at this point. Even still, it’s not something I can take on at this moment. Just too much going on IRL… adding more responsibility, even lightweight stuff, is not a good idea.

      Is there a meta comm for ani.social? I might toss out the idea there and see if anyone wants to mod.