We celebrated a one year birthday for both !anime@ani.social and !manga@ani.social. Over the past year we have grown from nothing to being (in my biased opinion), the best place on the fediverse to discuss anime and manga. It has been a lot of work, but they are both active enough now that I can do something like go on vacation for a couple days and they will keep going in my absence (including other mods that will manage things).

I made a series of birthday-themed anime clips to celebrate. If you are interested, here they are:

• Will You Come to My Birthday Party? - Gundam Wing (post on ani.social)
• Celebrating a Birthday with Yunyun - Konosuba (post on ani.social)
• Exchanging Birthday Presents - Azumanga Daioh (post on ani.social)
• Surprise! Happy Birthday! Let's Have Some Cake - Nichijou (post on ani.social)
• Bonus - Backup Cake - Nichijou

Main hardware community is doing good, with solid growth in subscribers and some organic engagement.

Child communities (Laptops, Gaming Laptops, Monitors) are seeing much slower growth and very weak engagement. But that's to be expected. It helps that supporting them works in parallel to the main hardware community.

I was originally planning to start the 2nd annual SuperbOwl Owl of the Year event on Election Day, and I'm glad I decided not to do that!

I started it on Saturday instead to give people time to cool off a bit, and one the plus side, I've seen a few users I haven't heard from in a while chime in again, but the initial response has gotten almost 10% downvotes, which I find pretty shocking. It was a big success last year and really raised the sub numbers, and even if you dont care about the "competition" you still get the same pics you would anyway.

A bit disappointed overall due to having dipped about 20 places on the active community list. I feel likes are still trending downward, and comments were feeling lower as well. I'm hoping it's just election stress taking up everyone's energy for social media and we'll bounce back soon. I still try to be a place people can come for a smile, so it's a bit sad if people aren't doing that.

Pleased that !otomegames@ani.social gained what looks like another active participant :)

Lots of downvotes on a recent post on !otomegames@ani.social that regular commenters engaged with happily, so I'm wondering if it's just people seeing it on local and disliking it as typical mainstream social media fodder, or if it's subscribers who don't comment not liking it, or both. Remember all those "which pill would you take" and then there's a couple different-color pills giving you different superpowers? It was something like that, but on-topic for otome games. Kind of bewildered by that.

Have looked at other Fedi instances including Mbin for backups, didn't find one that was just centered on games. Guess it'll probably be lemmy.zip.

!renpy@discuss.tchncs.de is slowly growing and currently at 71 subscribers 🎉 I've started promoting it a little bit on Mastodon and Bluesky as well

Someone else finally posted at !high_quality_gifs@lemmy.sdf.org , so that was encouraging.

Yesterday was a bit of a dumpster fire for all the communities on walledgarden.xyz with some server balancing that went quite poorly if I'm honest. I'll make a detailed post about it when I'm less annoyed and more confident things are squared away.

Things are back to normal so far today and !gardengrooves@walledgarden.xyz members are already hard at work sharing some awesome tracks.

!weedtime@walledgarden.xyz has also seen some new activities that have been great to see.

!loweffortmemes@walledgarden.xyz is active in bursts but it's our little home for shitposting and being goofy.

Good to see the other post about the centralization fir EV communities, well done @threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works

Doing ok on !showsandmovies@lemm.ee and !movies@lemm.ee

Trying to help with !stardewvalley@lemm.ee

Still chugging along with !world@quokk.au, really happy with how much community engagement some posts are getting, it’s starting to open up interesting and complex discussions.