If you create a community, please try and populate it with content. I see a lot of new communities with 0-1 posts from the mod. That’s not nearly enough to get people engaged - users are going to see that it’s a ghost town and leave.
If you have enough interest to create a community, you probably know something about the subject matter, so PLEASE add some posts (5-10 would be a good start). Maybe some questions to get people talking, even popular reposts from other sites. It sucks shouting into a void, but if you don’t do it, everyone else will also be shouting into a void.
Also please consider whether you need to create a community! When there are 100 million users of the site, there may be 1000 people who are interested in the same exact niche tabletop RPG as you, but there are <500,000 users here for now, so you’ll be lucky to find 10. Consider creating a thread in a broader community (like boardgames) until you have enough people talking in the thread that it gets messy - then it’s time to create a separate community.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Yes. But you can also immediatly appoint new mods and/or un-mod yourself if there are other mods present, so it is easy to give a community away when there are other interested users. It’s not a permanent thing.
Your community needs to be compatible wih the Fediverse Code of Conduct … but that boils down to “don’t be a dick and don’t post illegal stuff” which is pretty much just common sense. It’s not exactly hard to follow those rules ;)
Apart from that, you can set whatever rules you want. But keep in mind that the Fediverse is still a lot smaller than reddit, so if you are TOO niche / narrow / strict with the rules, you’ll have a hard time finding people who want to engage with your community. General, broad-themed communities with easy-to-follow rules have a bigger chance to thrive.
… and a personal little tip: don’t slam down the ban hammer at every opportunity. As a mod you are able to ban, silence, remove or otherwise “punish” people for bad behaviour, but that doesn’t mean that you have to do that. It’s a lot better to give users the benefit of the doubt, explain instead of punish (as they might not be aware that they did something bad in the first place), and give them a reasonable chance to fix their mistakes on their own before taking action. Post removal, bans and the like should be reserved solely for when the user in question is unwilling to cooperate OR did something obviously super shitty (like threatening other users, using slurs, posting illegal stuff etc.)
Well … as a last resort, yes. Original content or stuff from non-reddit sources is always preferable as it gives users of the Fediverse an incentive to visit communities here instead of going to reddit, but copypasted content is still better than no content at all, so if you can’t find interesting / worthwile stuff elsewhere, then copypasting from reddit is okay-ish too.
OC is still way better tho.