I do it because I want to inspire others to make communities like the ones we had back on Reddit. People talking and asking questions and getting answers and in general appreciating the subjects involved. Hopefully, we'll get there.
It's not much time or effort. Low traffic. Mostly I just post the 'best of' I've saved over the years. I recommend doing it if there's a niche you want to see on the Fediverse that isn't currently filled.
It's very quiet in my local community one. Mostly just me posting about interesting stuff I hear about in my town, though I have a few people following and liking things... which is cool? I really miss the my local community subreddits, so my hope is someday others from my town stumble onto it and we can all hang out online instead of in person like a real community.
it's quiet, pretty much just me posting and a handful of people upvoting, never really any comments. i hope this changes soon. people need to interact more. i don't mind being the only content generator for now, but it's pretty lonely
It can be a hassle. I run m/FoxNews for news about foxes. The microblog is constantly getting spammed by posts having the #FoxNews tag, which as you might guess is never news about foxes. There's no apparent way to disable the feature where magazines automatically get all content with a matching tag. Additionally, there are no notifications when somebody posts to your magazine, so you need to remember to check it regularly.
And besides, it's just one example. I have this problem with other magazines too. For example, m/Christianity is supposed to be a home for Christians, but it automatically picks up atheist posts tagged with #christianity. There's nothing wrong with anyone tagging their posts however the want to, but there's something wrong with the assumption that matching tag automatically belongs in a microblog without moderator approval.
Moderation tools are still lacking. I run a magazine for a marginal community and we get hate-downvotes that I can't do anything about. On the other hand, low traffic means there isn't a ton of moderation to do.
I run two smaller magazines which don't get posts frequently. I also don't feel comfortable advertising them, because that has generally turned me off from social media in the past. However, I've been able to engage a bit with others through microblogging. Incentivizing engagement is a bit challenging, but I do have some ideas for things I could write about to stir some discussion.
I might suggest that others try it. The fediverse gives us agency in the spaces we can create, and offers perspective on the bigger picture.
Pretty chill for me. All you fediverse users are such internet computer nerds!!! Why don't you want to plant stuff in glass (or any other material) containers!? Why?!?!
Technically I'm on Lemmy, but the principle is the same and there's a lot of overlap. I recommend starting new magazines for stuff you're interested in, moderation work is fairly light right now because the fediverse is low-traffic. I mainly just do it to help the community and out of personal passion, it's the same reason I host my own Lemmy instance.