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.

Are you and your friends actual historians?

Honestly?

Get some real historians.

Without people that are actually in the field, with stringent standards to go along with that, you’ll only get casual and unreliable answers. Which means that nobody wanting a good answer with depth and historiography is going to waste their time. Most of the time, responses there aren’t half as informative as Pugjesus’ memes.

R/askhistorians worked because it was run by experts and expert level responses were the only kind allowed. You knew going in that you might not get an answer at all, but if you did it was going to be relevant and be good enough to use as a source for a paper.

Nothing on the fediverse has that level of effort put into it.

Also, being real here, the moderation team having zero background in history research means that it’s incredibly unlikely to ever draw real historians to ask questions of. Why would they?

Could you hypothetically make it happen? Sure. I guess. If you reach out to some of the people that were generalists back on reddit, charm them into the idea of a more open forum, help them onboard, and make certain your mod team is both vigorous and rigorous, you might, might get a couple. I doubt it, since the ones that fled reddit already said that the lack of robust mod tools made them unwilling to start up here. But if you’re serious enough about it, maybe it could work.

Again, being real, while I appreciate your presence and activity, Don, you gotta realize that the percentage of historians that would consider it are very likely to see you as the mod and nope the fuck out. I hate dumping on you because I genuinely love the effort you put in to asking things nobody would otherwise bring up. But that same user history is offputting if someone were looking at it as an indicator of how serious a community will be run. I’m sorry to say it though, I really do appreciate you.

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 r/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 for here, even a general-knowledge reply can encourage clarifying comments from more-informed people who may otherwise doubt their qualifications.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Keep posting daily for a couple years. That and post on !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca .

Which couple mated?

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.

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.

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.