Keep posting daily for a couple years. That and post on !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca .
A big part of what makes it work on reddit is the large number of historians willing to provide lengthy well cited answers. Lemmy doesn’t have that.
Unfortunately not everything that works there works here. I’ve started a few different communities on a few different accounts and the only ones that take off are the ones I haven’t tried to force, they just sort of naturally drew people and ran themselves.
I hope I’m wrong though and askhistorians takes off. It would be fun to have here.
Honestly, the best history discussions on Lemmy seem to be people explaining history memes. That’s actually fitting for the type of content that has generally maintained momentum here. The quality of discourse we get here is quite good when it happens, but we are dealing more with broad-minded amateurs who respect proper historiography, rather than than actual historians. The name of this community does it a disservice in that case.
AH is a special case on reddit. Their moderation is unapologetically draconian and exclusive, and they’ve said on many occasions that they’re openly in it for the large preexisting audience, and find the rest of Reddit culture and admin tools to be a burden. You know exactly what you’re getting with them: either nothing, or really interesting responses from millennial historians with masters and PhDs.
I generally love it, except for the occasional AMA with some author/well known professor who is half-assing the discussion, yet the mods don’t want to alienate them because there could be IRL professional repercussions.
There’s no trick. It might take years for a second poster to join you.
You can share the feeling on !fedigrow@lemmy.zip weekly threads. We are several in that case.
Trigger the leftists with the questions. Joke?
I agree it’s hard to have specialized communities here due to the population size, except for the subject that were already the core interests of the people here like IT and left politics.
I would say focus on posting whatever makes you happy without expecting anything back.Focus on boosting comments instead of sheer volume of posts—people post specifically because they want answers, and seeing a long stream of posts with no responses makes them think it’s not worth bothering.
I think people’s familiarity with the askhistorians subreddit may be discouraging anyone without graduate-level academic experience from responding, but the subreddit didn’t start out requiring that level of rigor—it became more selective as the volume of replies increased. But even a non-expert reply can encourage clarifying comments from people with somewhat better knowledge who might not othewise feel qualified enough.
I agree with the other commenters. There’s really no good way to do this… You need both lots of people wanting to ask historians stuff and lots of historians willing to answer people’s questions. Lemmy lacks both!!
I’m not sure there really is a need for that right now, anyway. The reason there’s even a need for such specific comms is because generalistic comms get overburdened and messy, I’d say. Lemmy doesn’t have that issue because there aren’t enough people asking questions for it to be an issue, so there is no real need for an askhistorians comm.
Mind you, I think it’s cool, and if Lemmy grows it may become useful as well, so I do think it’s good that you started it.
Are you and your friends actual historians?
Yeah thats the thing, the sub-reddit works because there are actual historians. If the people running the one here are not, maybe it would be better to use “askhistory” or something, the equivalent of /r/askhistory, that allows amateurs to answers.
Naming it “ask historians” is misleading and will make people quit, if there is no actual historians there, regardless of the activity on the sub.
Answers would help. Posting random questions hoping others will answer isn’t what makes an Ask[X] community.
One thing you can try is to set hashtags on your posts so that users from other fedi softwares can find you. Most of the woso folks I see in !nwsl@lemmy.world are mastodon users. I dunno if lemmy supports it yet, but piefed does.
Op should post a link to join this sub. You can’t expect people seeing this on the fly to search and find. If you make an easy to follow button right on the thing it will work better. Not sure if lemmy does that though, reddit did though. Maybe they still do but fuck them.
There’s nothing you can do.
I single-handedly carried the Jazz community for a year until I said fuck you people and I gave up.
I just think it is the nature of social media, only 1 out of 300 people want to contribute and put in effort for others to enjoy, the rest just want to drink from the content fire hose and be spoon-fed. And that’s me being generous.
Most important thing, if nobody knows of your community nobody can subscribe. And for that to succeed you really need to know how to link to it properly. askhistorians.lemmy.world does not exist. If anything it is !askhistorians@lemmy.world and not just in the title but in the post body so people can click it.
And maybe you should be coordinating with the people of !askhistorians@piefed.social to consolidate on one platform so subscribers aren’t split.
Just a guess, but maybe that you post a seemingly endless stream of mostly insincere and/or easily searched questions while rarely engaging with the people who answer you isn’t leading to interest in your other projects.
Could you combine it with multiple subjects eg sociology and try to get more people that way? It’s the best guess i have
Might help if you had a introduction post of who you are and what areas you specialize in
