Been a little while since I popped into one of these threads. Some notable events:

• [email protected] is entering an exciting period as a new gundam show just started. The first episode discussion thread was lively, so I am hoping that continues through the season.
• [email protected] is also quite active at the moment due to the start of the new anime season. There have been quite a number of names that I don’t recognize from past seasons, so that is exciting.
• [email protected] is similarly experiencing a bit of influx of new users posting and commenting. I haven’t been as active as I would like in this community due to time, so it is a welcome development to have more, different people posting.

Like winamp skins for lemmy?

I am a big fan of content-specific instances. Some instances off the top of my head that fit this description:

• bookwormstory.social - Instance about the Ascendance of a Bookworm series
• ani.social - Instance about anime/manga/Japanese media
• slrpnk.net - Instance focused on the climate crisis and related issues
• programming.dev - Instance focused on software development
• startrek.website - Instance about Star Trek
• literature.cafe - Instance about books and writing

…and I am sure there are many others. I just think that having a focus like that provides a more interesting local instance environment than a large, generalist instance, though both have a place.

Edit: Reading is hard and I misunderstood that this post is about promoting lemmy on reddit. I don’t have any experience to contribute with that, but I will leave the rest of my post for posterity.

By self-promotion, do you mean creating content for youtube/a blog/etc. and then posting it to lemmy? If so, then I think that is fine within reason. In the communities I mod, I have allow self-promotion with these guidelines:

• Be an active member of the community on other posts too, not just your own content
• If you post your own content, at least be responsive to questions you might get in the comment section
• Rate limit your self-promotion so that it doesn’t feel spammy (no defined rate, more vibes-based)

I have a couple posters that have posted article or projects that they have created and been fine. I also have a couple people I have ended up banning because they would just post links to their own content and vanish otherwise.

All that said, there is a sizable portion of lemmy that seems to chafe against any kind of corporate-controlled social media. So, there is an inbuilt hostility that can exert an outsized influence in smaller communities.

subtitle playback

This is still a little weird. I found that the web client (in a browser) handles this really well with default settings. However, if I try to use the desktop app or a mobile client, I have to force it to burn in the subtitles for them to show up reliably. Fortunately, there are per-client settings for this now:

I own a Prius (not a PHEV though, just a hybrid) and can corroborate that my mileage goes down significantly in the winter months. It is a combination of a couple factors in my experience.

• Needing to run the engine more to heat things up for defrosting and heating the cabin.
• Related to the above, I tend to idle a lot more in the winter while cleaning ice/snow off the car, letting it warm up, or clearing the driveway.
• Switching to winter tires (Blizzaks) negatively impacts rolling resistance compared to the LRR tires (Ecopias) I use the rest of the year.

I tend to average ~45 mpg in the summer and ~37 mpg in the winter over the past two years.

Starting a new community is an uphill slog. Some tips and observations:

• Make sure to subscribe to the community from several of the large instances so that it is federated there and people viewing the all feed can see it.
• If you haven’t yet, make sure to announce the community in [email protected] and/or [email protected]
• If you can think of some kind of recurring post series, it is a good structure to provide a steady drip of content. For latin, maybe something like a weekly post about the etymology of a modern word with a latin root?
• In general, posts with a lead image generate much more interaction than non-image, discussion posts. So, the meme-type posts can serve a role to help people discover the community.

Fantastic, thanks! I haven’t made announcements yet about the new community, but hoping to do that some time this week when I get a chance.

I haven’t been able to post as much this past week compared to normal, but things have been going ok:

• [email protected] is actually kind of booming right now with the start of a new season of shows. I have seen lots of first-time commenters chiming in on episode threads. It actually hit ~300 users/day at one point over the weekend.
• [email protected] has been calm but active. There are a handful of other fairly reliable posters that have been able to keep things going while I have been away.

The not as active ones:

• [email protected] - I inherited this community when the previous moderator had to step away for an extended period of time. The nokotan community in general is very meme-heavy, and I just don’t really know how to engage with that very well. There is only so much non-meme content about the series. So, I am going to try to binge-read the manga and start posting chapter discussion threads when new chapters are released. I just need to find the time to do that.
• [email protected] - This is another kind of special case. The current, most active Gundam community is [email protected]. However, that instance announced that they are shutting down later this month. The current users over there were interested in setting up a new community but there wasn’t anybody that wanted to moderate. So, I offered my help in that respect. It just started this past week, so there isn’t much there yet, but I am going to try to keep posting any Gundam-related content I find over there.

You must have taken Nokotan’s loss pretty hard. /s

Good luck finding new mods and I am hoping that you are able to come back before Dan Da Dan season 2 this summer.