I'd say start as broad as possible. Specialized communities come later with size. Keep it as open as possible. Numbers is the game.
this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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Ask Lemmy
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Create it, and post. Don’t be one of those people who create a community and just ignores it.
Create the community and have 5 good posts. Then post once a day for a week so there’s fresh content. Take advantage of big fights that are coming up so there’s the most interest.
Then don’t forget to advertise in the new community communities.
Just create it, and if there's demand, people will show up. There are a few communities meant for advertising new ones, but simply posting there yourself will also make it appear in the "All" feed for people browsing that.
There's only so much you can do to grow it. Lemmy is still a pretty small platform with a limited audience, and I'm getting the sense that cage fighting isn't exactly close to most people's hearts around here.
I try to make anyone that does participate feel like their comments/posts matter. I engage back with everyone so they feel seen/heard. I try to pay attention to what topics they want to discuss. I try to find new things they probably haven't seen on their own to keep them surprised. I mainly just act like the people here are already my friends and treat them as such since it's such a relatively small space.
I try to do that with my posts. I'll look into the logistics of creating it soon and use the answers here to try and foster some engagement!
I scrolled your posts/comments quick, and you seem a pretty lively and engaging person. I think you will do fine, it's just important to keep in mind things can grow really slowly here since it's a much smaller user base than a lot of platforms we're used to anymore. Best of luck!
Yeah, you totally should make a community for that if you can't already find one.
I think that you want to do next is just start posting relevant news stories on a regular basis in order to build up some kind of audience of subscribers. RSS feeds on various website and blogs can be a good way to source news stories to post here on the fediverse, so I recommend taking some time to set up some feeds that you can check regularly.
Once you have a decent little audience, then you should be able to get some discussions going. And the community can continue to grow from there. Creativity goes a long way here.
I recommend using Lemmy Federate.
It's a tool that tries to subscribe to your community with a puppet account on various instances. This allows your community to reach those instances and for your posts to appear there.
Check out !fedigrow@lemmy.zip especially the "weekly thread - how is everybody doing with their communities?", it's basically people giving each other regular advice about that.
Thanks, currently trying to figure out the logistics of creating a community.
Well if you're on the lemmy.world default web interface there should be a "Create Community" button at the top of the page. I never used it tho.
If you want to look for existing communities, check out the Lemmy Explorer. Apparently there are several existing MMA communities: https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=martial+arts One strategy is to take over an existing community: 1) contact the listed mod, 2) if they don't answer then contact Support for that instance and ask to be made a mod. But if you end up just making your own community, then you can make posts announcing it on all those old communities.
Create it. Advertise it in !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca and federate it.
Time and patience. Maybe a little risky advertising by going to other platforms and saying how your instance exists.
- Posting
- Cross posting to relevant comms
- 'Advertising' comms like fedigrow etc
There is a commmunity called new communities just for announcing new groups! 20k subscribers on Lemmy.world
Build it and they will come