>> Community culture used to be big back in the day, but as fics drifted over to AO3, fanart and graphics to tumblr, and random thoughts/reviews sprinkled in just about everywhere, the communities have been somewhat left behind. <<

Some communities have survived and are still highly active. These include comms devoted to major fandoms (e.g. Harry Potter, Star Wars), umbrella comms for extremely popular topics (e.g. crafts, icons), event comms (e.g. bingo fests, exchanges), and template-based comms (e.g. recipes, recommendations). It's useful to know those categories and their various strategies for survival and activity.

See also my posts on "Improving Communities on Dreamwidth," "Activating Communities," "Improving Community in Fandom."


>> But they're such a wonderful hub for potential new folks to stumble across! <<

I agree. I always recommend that newcomers to DW check the Interests page and to find communities they want to subscribe. It's also good to check those resources once or twice a year, such as during major events like this, because the activity is higher then which makes it easier to find things.

>> So, have you loved a community today? <<

I have!

I made my daily "Birdfeeding" post in birdfeeding. This is crossposted on my blog and in that community.

Each week I make a post to followfriday where folks can recommend communities or individual blogs worth reading; here is today's rec post. I also make a thematic post on my blog that lists active communities on Dreamwidth, which I then link over on the community. Today's is Follow Friday 4-26-24: Digital Art. Remember I mentioned icons above as a thriving topic? Icon communities come up in most topics that I feature. \o/ I encourage everyone to drop by and recommend your favorite communities.

Periodically I advertise my communities on dw_community_promo. If you moderate any communities, I encourage you to promote them there, at least once or twice a year. New comms can be promoted once a week, and older ones once a month. Today I did a mass promo of my communities including a pitch about3W4DW: Three Weeks for Dreamwidth Community Promotion.

I've probably made brief comments in several other communities today or yesterday, because I'm linking people's 3W4DW events in my gather post. I try and remember to tell folks when I've done that, so for any community event there is likely a comment.


>> Or have you recently posted something that could be linked in a community? Reviews, meta, fanart, recs, silly memes... Please consider sharing them where applicable <3

Crossposting is a wonderful way to keep communities active. I see people posting tons of things that would suit various communities. For my communities, and occasionally others, I comment encouraging folks to crosspost. Generally speaking, it's safe to crosspost anything between your blog and one topical community. It's also safe to crosspost things to topical communities that have little or no overlap, like if you make a post about your Harry Potter themed garden (lilies and petunias and narcissus, oh my!), you could crosspost it to a Harry Potter comm and a gardening comm. The main thing to avoid is crossposting to every comm in a topic, like all the HP comms, because then lots of people would see multiple copies of the same post, which gets annoying. But if you're promoting something like an annual event, then it makes more sense to hit all the relevant comms, once.

Do you moderate a community? Make sure that its profile, and sticky post if any, tell people that crossposting is welcome and give some examples about what kinds of content you'd like to see crossposted and how. This is an easy way to boost activity, because once somebody has written a post, it takes only a few seconds to duplicate it or post a link to it.

Some communities have near-identical content, like recipecommunity and creative_cooks. Several of us regularly crosspost the same recipes to both. Other things may diverge.
If I post nature pictures on my blog, I often crosspost them, but because I frequently break the set into multiple posts, I look at the content. Did I catch a bird? That post goes on birdfeeding. Does one post have a lot of pictures from an herb or flower garden? It goes on gardening. Wildflowers, the prairie garden, other wildlife like a rabbit or butterfly, a sunset? It goes on common_nature. So if you look at your posts, especially long thinky ones or anything with images, consider connections to different communities where you could crosspost or link to it. Also think about what topics you post most frequently. If you don't already have a community you could crosspost those, consider finding one to join.