this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024

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Fedigrow

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To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks

founded 7 months ago

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We are currently around 50k monthly active users. What do you think could lead to the next newcomers wave? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A few ideas from the top of my head

Flairs that can be allowed to filter content in a community
Major online communites (can be subreddits, or other communities) moving to Lemmy
Reddit removing old.reddit
Reddit banning people using VPNs (already happening, see [email protected] )
Lemmy becoming the reference source of knowledge for a certain domain

Second point is probably crucial, but I don't see any major subreddit wanting to move here. StarTrek is the exception more that the rule.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Think about the experience new users have.

I bring this up a lot, but among the things putting people off from sticking to Lemmy, the new user experience is just not great. I'm not talking about choosing an instance, I'm talking about the general attitude Lemmy has towards content in the feed.

I know it's a very popular idea that if you don't like communities or instances or users, you can block them. Unfortunately, most social media users aren't interested in spending a couple of hours curating their feed to make it useful for them. People are coming in to a feed full of a growing number of niche porn communities, and if they can sort through that, they find heavy-handed political messages, FOSS bros telling everyone how popular software sucks, repost bots with zero discussion, and small community moderators desperately posting dozens of links into the void, hoping for bites.

At the very least, Lemmy needs a sort algorithm that is capable of keeping a page of the feed from being dominated by one community. Going further, I think we could benefit from giving instance admins the tools to curate a default feed that appeals to a wider audience of users.

Maybe then the smaller communities would have a shot at growing.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Very valid point here. I've forgotten what an unfiltered Lemmy would look like at this point. Even with a filtered list, I just scrolled through my usual All, Top 6 Hours and didn't find a thing I wanted to read as it was all depressing news for the first 3 pages.

The critique about one community dominating is a good one also. I block just about all the meme comms, but I leave the Science Memes one unblocked because there are a few I enjoy, but there are days where it's just my whole front page and it's like, give someone else a chance guys!

Didn't Reddit have a "welcome pack" of pre-subscribbed subs like Blaze mentions in their reply? It might be nice if the main site or some of the app developers would have welcome packs so when you installed you could select a "Tech," "Humor," "Science and Nature," etc starter pack of subscribed comms to get you into it, and then you can adjust as you see fit. I'm thinking when we came on board, there wasn't as much we had to block at first so we could do it a bit at a time.

I'm not sure how NSFW is handled now. I have most of it blocked because if that's what you want, I'm not sure why you'd come here to it when the rest of the internet is right there, but I agree again with your point. I'm pretty open minded, but there is a lot available here that while I don't feel it shouldn't exist, I don't feel the need to be exposed to that much of fringe fetishes that aren't my thing! 😆

If NSFW started off hidden and you could either click an "I'm All In" setting to unleash it all, or just have access to a comm list and you can uncheck what you see fit, that might be more useful to most people than the all or nothing we have now.

Also, while I'm talking about it, I'd be welcome to some more granularity is the NSFW, like the perennial NSFW vs NSFL (life) where we split up things like porn and gore, or even medical gore vs violent imagery, etc. I'd be interested in some of the medical stuff, and even in Superbowl, there's medical things I'd be up to share and educate about that the general subscriber base isn't going to want to see there, but is animal rescue/rehab related. If that was something people could leave on or turn off, the same community could serve 2 overlapping audiences without making a seperate group.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Totally agree. Differentiating NSFW and NSFL is a must have. Right now I have NSFW turned on bc I occasionally want to see Ukraine combat stuff, but I've probably had to spend like 2+ hours blocking all the niche porn communities which is becoming untenable as every day a few more spin up. And I love the idea of a welcome/starter pack for new users; that's the other part of Lemmy that's really lacking - finding the communities you want to be a part of (if they even exist on the fediverse yet)! So many communities are ghost towns, other topic-based communities have duplicates or triplicate communities on different instances, etc. my strategy is to subscribe to communities as I find them in my feed, but having an index of the most popular communities curated for new users would be a game changer.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

I created a list in a comment below, feel free to suggest any community you think should be there too

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

You have a good point.

Most of the people here despise sorting algorithms, and are fine with doing their own filtering, but to appeal to a wider audience, there should indeed be a way to suggest new joiners that they subscribe to a set of general communities that can be appealing to almost anyone. Of course experienced users can disable that, but that would definitely help.

By coincidence, I had to come up with a list of "active communities that are not memes, tech, news or politics", and here it is. It might be a starting point

Discussion:

Pictures:

[email protected]

Learning:

Entertainment:

Manual Hobbies

Art

[email protected]

Animals

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

I'll upvote you as per my support for you in another reply...

But I notice an animal community egregiously missing from your list... 😅

Edit: Just checked the rankings. How am I below bats, racoons, and possums??? I don't get these users sometimes! (kidding) But seriously, how are all of these above Dogs? I'd expect them to be up there with cats just do to, you know, they live in peoples' houses with them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

how are all of these above Dogs? I’d expect them to be up there with cats just do to, you know, they live in peoples’ houses with them.

Yes, I'm not a pet person but I was surprised too. Maybe dogs just have less active posters?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

I just looked at the stats quick and it's somewhat insightful.

Dogs has the most subs (3.4k), but only gets a post every 2-3 days, so not as many daily users (42).

Opossums has about half the subs (1.9k) , posts once or twice a day, and has over 500 daily users, which I don't know if I've ever gotten...great for them!

Bats and Raccoons fall in the middle of those numbers.

I'm killing it in total comments though and have more subs than all but Cats, which has an outstanding almost 18k. Out of 50k users, that is pretty dang impressive. I'd like to think at least a quarter of my subs are due to the work I put in, but I assume most of them came looking for a clone Reddit group.

Does any of it mean anything? Probably not. I'm glad to see them have a chance to shine. I like all the animals anyway. I enjoyed my ride on the first page of communities during Owl of the Year and picked up a lot of new subs during that, and I hope they make the most of it too. I don't know how hard it is to find new and unique pics of some of those animals day in and day out though. Again though, I feel that would make Dogs higher up as many people can just glance down and see a dog! I guess Lemmy folk are just cat people.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Edited 😄

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Sopuli kind of achieves this, by defederating the instances that are for the kind of content I would want a separate account for anyway.

Lemmy could really use a feature where instance admins can "shadow defedarate" instances and communities. They would not actually become inaccessible, but instead simply not appear in all, instead only appearing for users who have found the community some other way, and subscribed.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (2 children)

The same thing that brings anyone: whatever cannot be found elsewhere. This could be functionality that was removed from competitors or content that is exclusive to Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I mainly agree with this. We're in much the same situation as a small local shop vs a Walmart. We can't compete on the same things, so we need to focus on the experience.

It's the reason I'm very big on the take we should begin reigning in behavior of the user base and return to being a more welcoming and respectful place. If we don't build a better environment than Reddit, Facebook, X, etc, what do we have? And if we can't do it when it's this small, it'll either never get bigger or be too big to tackle.

I don't think taking more users from Reddit is realistic. Anyone who hasn't left by now isn't interested in leaving. We should keep doing what we're doing and embrace the audience we have. It's slower growth, but we can keep a better focus on quality and experience IMO.

Making original content and sharing it with friends in other places is what we can do right now. A lot of us in here are familiar with each other's names by now, so we're building awareness of what we're doing here, it's just going to take time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It’s the reason I’m very big on the take we should begin reigning in behavior of the user base and return to being a more welcoming and respectful place. If we don’t build a better environment than Reddit, Facebook, X, etc, what do we have? And if we can’t do it when it’s this small, it’ll either never get bigger or be too big to tackle.

I agree

Anyone who hasn’t left by now isn’t interested in leaving.

I'm not so sure. There is currently some debate in https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/, more than usual, you see that some people are on the fence. Other people might have never heard of Lemmy ever.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Awareness of our "brand" could definitely be improved yet. 50k of people on the internet isn't even a drop in the bucket.

I haven't been to Reddit since the 3rd party ban other to try to search for product reviews, so I'm totally clueless as to the state of things there and I avoid most Lemmy posts about Reddit as well as it's too close to stalking an ex for me. We broke up for a reason and we should leave it at that!

I'll welcome anyone looking to come here to have a pleasant time though. I don't want to get all gatekeepy about this place though, as it's here for everyone, but I'd definitely prefer that they're people that conduct themselves politely, and not the standard Reddit or 4chan stereotype behavior, but that's what happens if/when this place ever starts getting more mass migration from other platforms.

I really wish Beehaw would have played out a bit different. I think they had good intent, but clamped down on things a bit too fast and they cut off their growth too early. For me at least. I haven't been on there in a few months, but when they talked about leaving Lemmy, I just couldn't invest the effort in jumping ship again as I was starting to enjoy what I was fostering here.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

I really wish Beehaw would have played out a bit different. I think they had good intent, but clamped down on things a bit too fast and they cut off their growth too early.

Definitely. They really put a lot of efforts in building their community, with their documented moderation guidelines etc., but cutting themselves off LW and SJW is just too much...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

I agree to a certain extend, but that brings us to the question of how that content is going to be discovered by people not knowing about Lemmy. With search engines being only a shadow of their former selves, and Reddit shadowbanning Lemmy URLs that's probably another issue we should keep in mind

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Flairs would be super nice. I hope we could also have multiple flairs on a post, as opposed to how reddit has them limited to only 1. I reccon letting the Community/Instance owners take charge as to how many flairs posts could have would be the smartest option

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I don't have much hopes on the Lemmy side unfortunately: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/317

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Interesting variety of opinions on there, thanks for sharing that one.

I like our little group here debating how to make Lemmy better, even if nobody ever actually implements any of this stuff. It gives me better insight to how others use this site or social media in general, and I can use that to better use what tools I do actually have available.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

if nobody ever actually implements any of this stuff.

You don't have to implement the platform to provide feedback on how you use it.

Car manufacturer ask drivers for their feedback to improve their models, not mechanics.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Aw tjats unfortunate

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

As I've said since the beginning, I'd like to see more diversification of opinion in the userbase. There are a LOT of people here that are the kind of activist you'd see get banned on Reddit for being hyper-aggressive and it really turns neutral- or otherwise-thinking users off. They don't discuss, they immediately attack and flame and it's not good for building communities around except hyper-focused ones based on those issues specifically.

I want people who know the reason they think something and don't just have an emotional response and stick with it, then strawman everyone else in the vicinity who deviates.

As we say in the main Rules for our Community ( [email protected] ), "Not everything is a genocide, and not everyone even slightly to the right of you is a Nazi."

I also want MUCH better Community controls such as the ability to decorate, and disable downvotes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

One major thing I miss from Reddit was the powerful search bar that I had with old reddit+res.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Hopefully now that plugins can be developed this will be fixed