Pictures are fun to look at. Also, one picture can tell you things that 10 sentences cannot.
I would personally prefer a short comic (4-frames) than a short paragraph. But it also depends on the context and quality of the writing. Idk.
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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Asklemmy
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I think a lot of amateur writers feel more comfortable with a prompt or an established theme for the community to get started with. It's part of why WritingPrompts, HFY, and HumansAreSpaceOrcs were pretty popular on reddit. After that, I imagine it's just like any online community, a matter of promoting it to people and getting splintered tiny communities to band together in one place.
It looks like your community is pretty general theme-wise, have you considered maybe a "theme of the week" post, or a sticky where people can dump prompts for someone to pick up and run with?
!writingprompts@lemmy.ml
And similar writing-themed communities exist. I think naming such a community appropriately and promoting it as such, so that more people can find it is difficult and is your main problem.
I think so yes, digital comics are harder to produce (even with AI). Good art and design are easily recognizable as opposed to text.
This is what I imagine asklemmy posts would have looked like in the 1950s.
There are so many levels one could answer at. First off, we don't want every community to exist on lemmy.world. Just because it doesn't exist there doesn't mean you need to make it. Second, I consider graphic novels/comics/manga to be just as out of fashion as books these days. AFAIK kids barely read at all anymore. Third, I consider drawing much harder than writing, but that's a personal thing. Heck, both are trivially generated by AI these days, so the idea of having a superiority complex about one seems silly to me. Artists should stick together. In the same medium, if they want to.
If you don't like seeing visual art next to written art, that's a personal preference. I don't think it says anything about the state of people's brains that one community is larger than another, if anything, visuals are probably just easier to market in a world with a LOT of "content" going around. But at the end of the day, there just aren't a whole lotta people using Lemmy. So I'm not surprised when you say a specific community doesn't have a lot of activity. It could be that people interested in stories just have more established communities on [competing sites].
IDK about the "kids barely read at all anymore" part. I'm reading a lot (though mostly web novels) and it's not been that long since I've been a kid
And do you believe that you are representative of what most kids these days do in their free time?
Do you have a link to your community? I would be interested
Eh? Comics are stories. I love reading books, so much, and never found it fatiguing? By easier to draw, do you mean "a picture is worth a thousand words"? Like it's easier to convey meaning in pictures? Maybe, but I love long books, short stories and comics too.
If you want a great story, here is one for your group
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-fiddler-of-bayou-teche/