In my personal (unsubstantiated and speculative) opinion, the biggest hurdle to adoption for Lemmy and the fediverse is the lack of content in most topics outside of technology and politics. This leaves many people going back to Reddit, which shines at topic-specific content.
However, I think the solution is relatively simple, provided there is enough community effort. Here is my proposal.
Tl;dr
We make a group effort to generate content (posts and comments) for certain topics and communities, one at a time, to make them viable and rich in content. The goal is to attract fans, commenters, and posters and kick-start the community.
Full Plan
- We create a Lemmy community dedicated to organizing this effort.
- We gather enough contributors to make the effort viable (exact figure TBD). Contributions don’t have to be serious or high-effort. The strength comes from our group effort to focus on one community at a time.
- We choose a topic or community to focus on, preferably something specific, since narrower topics are easier to get off the ground. For example, we might pick a specific TV show’s community, a certain video game franchise, or the woodworking community. Anything goes! Ideally, it would be a topic many people here would like to see improve and thrive.
- Whatever community we pick in #3, we focus only on that community for a period of time (possibly 2–3 months, but we can decide this together), creating content until it becomes a thriving, viable community for people genuinely interested in it. It’s a solution to the chicken-and-egg problem: we’re manually inserting an egg to give life to the community.
- Once we have established a community rich in content, we can start promoting it, both in the fediverse and more importantly outside of it. This can be both direct promotion, or subtle promotion, such as linking to our community’s post on reddit, facebook and twitter.
- Once we succeed, we move on to a different community and different topic
How exactly do we do this? We split into two groups: those actually interested in the topic and those who aren’t particularly interested but want to help out.
For those NOT particularly interested in the topic:
- Repost content from other communities, such as Reddit, Facebook groups, etc. (For honesty’s sake, we would mark it as reposted rather than pretend it’s original.)
- Make an effort to genuinely interact with the community. Even people who aren’t particularly interested in a topic sometimes comment on Reddit and elsewhere, and we can do the same here.
- Optional: Research the topic. Maybe you’ll become interested in it anyway!
- Once our community gains content, promote it in the fediverse and elsewhere in the internet such as relevant subreddits, facebook groups and twitter. Promotion can be subtle, such as sharing links to specific posts in our community elsewhere for people to find them.
For those interested in the topic:
- Make a genuine effort to create original content for the community. For many of us, this would take us out of our comfort zone. But for the sake of creating open variants of communities we enjoy, it’s worth it!
- Interact with other content through comments.
One important note: we must ensure that what we create is genuine content, not slop. We want communities that are actually enjoyable to browse and interact with, not just higher numbers.
Your Thoughts?
What do you think? Would you be interested in joining this initiative? I could only start it if there is meaningful interest.
Was also thinking about this. Making this comment to save the post and see if I can participate in future. I wanna try to post at least one meme or something per day, it’s not much but better than nothing.
While this is great I think it’s all for naught until we fix the onboarding process.
Not to contradict you but that’s absolutely the biggest hurdle.
In my personal (unsubstantiated and speculative) opinion, the biggest hurdle to adoption for Lemmy and the fediverse is the lack of content in most topics outside of technology and politics.
Agree, but one thing to easily improve this is better federation with mastodon.
How many of the posts that you see in your feed come from mastodon? For me it’s probably less than 5%. Well guess what, mastodon users are about 90% of all fediverse users. stats (active mastodon users: 1.5M, active lemmy users: 36k)
Why don’t we see the large amount of already-existing content from mastodon?
(If you want to make as much content for lemmy, as is already existing for mastodon, we’d need about 1.5M new users. instead one technological change could get us there too.)
This has its own hurdles.
Mastodon has exactly zero support for groups. Most of its users don’t even know that the Fediverse has groups. Mastodon is all about user accounts following user accounts.
Lemmy, on the other hand, is all about groups. User accounts literally can’t follow other user accounts. Completely different technological philosophies.
Then there’s the inevitable culture clash.
Make Lemmy more well-known on Mastodon, and you’ll have gaggles of Mastodon extremists barging into Lemmy, behaving like they’re still on Mastodon (well, technically, they are) and trying to force Mastodon’s culture upon Lemmy.
Like, CW’ing posts that someone on Mastodon might find sensitive (Lemmy doesn’t even have this feature), cutting “long posts” with over 500 characters into threads of itty-bitty pieces of no more than 500 characters, using the right hashtags for content discovery (Lemmy doesn’t even support hashtags) and visibly mentioning everyone your comment will go to because Mastodon users are apparently easily freaked out by posts that don’t come from someone whom they follow, and that don’t mention them either.
They will clash with Lemmy users and, more importantly, Lemmy moderators who live by Lemmy’s culture which is almost identical to Reddit’s, and which has exactly nothing to do with Mastodon’s culture.
Also, Lemmy’s enclosed threaded conversations will clash with Mastodon which doesn’t have any support for enclosed threaded conversations whatsoever. Something that especially Hubzilla, (streams), Forte and Mitra have to struggle with because they’ve implemented FEP-171b “Conversation Containers” which is completely and utterly incompatible with how Mastodon works. From Mastodon’s point of view, both Hubzilla and its descendants and the whole Threadiverse are “broken”.
The result: Mastodon users will block tons of Lemmy users. Mastodon users will demand entire Lemmy servers be Fediblocked. Entire Lemmy servers will end up on subscribable Mastodon blocklists for behaving too “un-Mastodon-like”. Lemmy servers, in turn, will defederate from tons of Mastodon servers. Once enough big Lemmy servers have blocked mastodon.social (which is 22% of the whole Fediverse, and which is chock-full of the most clueless Mastodon users), it’s game over.
you’re writing as if you know what users want. let people decide themselves please. allow mastodon<->lemmy federation, make it an optional feature that you can activate on sign-up or in your profile setting. this way everyone is happy.
https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta@piefed.social/p/2285233/piefed-v1-7-11-is-released-finding-and-adding-people-to-follow-posts-from-rss-feeds-and
hmm, when i copy-paste your username into my mastodon instance search field, i get:
so i can see your user profile. however, it reports as “0 Posts” and when i scroll down, i do get a few of your posts/comments, but only very few (like 20 in total maybe).
this is what i meant when i talk about a lack of compatibility between lemmy/piefed and mastodon.
The change to Piefed linked above is from 5 days ago, that’s probably why only recent posts show up.
For a community, we already have !fedigrow@lemmy.zip (for growing communities) and !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com (for growing the Fediverse)
Also if we’re focusing on growing a specific community we should probably also try to let people outside of Lemmy know about it (Reddit/Discord/Twitter…)
It is great to hear that communities for this purpose already exist. Do you happen to know the mods there?
I agree on letting people know on reddit and twitter. I added point #5 on that. Thank you!
Do you happen to know the mods there?
If you’re on topic and don’t break the groups’ rules, I don’t think you’d need privileged contact to the moderatos. Maybe make a post every week for things like community spotlights, community revivals, engaging topics, etc.?
Also, the more people interact, the more contents propagate, kinda like an algorithm but more analogical. So engaging more should boost organic growth.
And there being people from different places in here, betting on one type of content is imo risky. Better I think would be to just post what you’d like to see, and other like-minded folk may notice.
Now, on what Die4Ever said…
Also if we’re focusing on growing a specific community we should probably also try to let people outside of Lemmy know about it (Reddit/Discord/Twitter…)
Something that hadn’t crossed my mind but that was noted to me when I gave a similar idea is that doing so against direct competitors could be seen as sabotage, and moderator action would very likely come. Not in those words but in this idea though.
Better I think is to prioritize the fediverse in a passive or at least non-antagonistic manner.
I think there are a lot of people who might want to help, but don’t have the time/energy/experience to organize it
I’m supportive of this, and happy to help where appropriate :) Please feel free to tag me in future posts about this, in case I miss it
If you can, I would prefer that you use the existing communities for this project because there’s no need to dilute efforts further. Also, see if you can create a Mastodon account where you post those announcements too, because that’s a large userbase that is already familiar with what this place is and can even post from their accounts
appreciate your advice and willingness to participate! I agree and will do that.
Mod of both here. As you can see on the weekly threads on !fedigrow@lemmy.zip , community builders aren’t that many
Some other ideas I forgot to add to the other comment
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Have some mechanism for people to suggest which niches get worked on, and then have one person decide on the schedule. Else it gets disorganized
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Shorten the cycles to a few weeks rather than months. I feel like people will get impatient if they need to wait months to get past a niche they don’t care about. Two weeks might be a nicer starting point, and then you can adjust it up or down?
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Do outreach about the project all over the place, and not just in fedigrow. Fedigrow reaches the involved and active people, but not everyone else that might be interested in the theme. For example:
- Ask people about their favorite communities for the topic of that cycle on !asklemmy@lemmy.world, !ask@piefed.social, etc
- Memes in !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world (see the beans, corn, and similar trends), which are very low effort
- post lists of that cycle’s relevant communities in !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
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While you can prioritize one community, don’t restrict it to that one. It will be easier to find people interested in crafts, compared to say crochet specifically. Also people can have strong feelings about which specific community or instance is best, and some users might refuse to post to an instance they don’t agree with. So if you give a list of which communities you want to grow, it might go over better
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Thanks for linking those - I’ve subscribed to both now :)
I have been putting off focusing on some niches too long, mostly because of IRL executive dysfunction.
Great thing in my eyes would be to attract people who do original content. And write lots of comments/replies. I mean the great thing about Reddit is, how it’s not just a RSS reader, but there’s plenty people there who reply and post their own art / blogposts / research etc. I think we need way more of that.
Reposting is fine as well, I think? But to compete with Reddit and other platforms, I think we need to do even more.
I agree. I personally believe that the fediverse has talented people who have the potential to create interesting content outside of technology and politics, but they feel discouraged being the only person to post in an otherwise deserted space. I believe that our concentrated effort will encourage these people to come out and contribute.
I dont think growth for growth’s sake is a good thing.
I agree, and I specifically aim not to make this growth for the sake of growth. It’s an effort to increase diversity of content on the fediverse, and quality of communities outside of technology and politics. And we will only pick topics and communities that existing members are interested in improving.
And we will only pick topics and communities that existing members are interested in improving.
Generally speaking, the existing members are very resistant to any topic outside of technology, politics, and gaming. You should see some of the pushback I get for daring to post popculture or feminist news. The way we get more diverse topics is by gaining a more diverse user base. And we make sure the new users that come here know that there’s space for them and people who try to push them out will be called out for being exclusionary jerks about it.
All that to say - I would totally join in on this kind of project. I love learning about new topics and I enjoy posting content here.
You should see some of the pushback I get for daring to post popculture or feminist news.
Can you please share this with me so I can see this? I may end up running into similar challenges as you, so it would be helpful to foresee them.
The way we get more diverse topics is by gaining a more diverse user base.
I partly agree, and I think this initiative is partly aimed at making the fediverse more attractive to users who are interested in these topics that we will target.
Generally speaking, the existing members are very resistant to any topic outside of technology, politics, and gaming.
I personally have seen a lot of appetite from many users here for topics outside of these. I think the problem is that, those topics tend to be more scattered and there is less consensus. But the beauty of the fediverse, and this reddit-like format we have, is that topic-specific communities can thrive independently and we do not all have to like them.
I may end up being wrong and this ends up being a failed project, but I think it is worth trying. And I am happy and thankful that you are interested despite your skepticism!
I’ve mostly seen the pushback in downvotes and comments claiming that anything related to popculture is not newsworthy. Granted, there’s a handful of very loud users in the Fediverse and I may be attributing too much to just a few voices.
I have been very stubborn about moving away from Reddit, so I have the spite and motivation to make the fediverse better and bigger haha. It would be nice to have a more focused goal for growth! I’ve been posting in various communities almost every day just to throw stuff out there.
Seems like a good idea, although this
we must ensure that what we create is genuine content, not slop. We want communities that are actually enjoyable to browse and interact with, not just higher numbers.
might be tricky. I think a lot of what makes up the best content on Reddit is people who have a high depth of personal expertise, motivated interest, etc. with the given topic. So maybe a good approach would be to try to identify if there are any less-explored topics that people here already have that for, but aren’t posting about because no one else is.
Communities grow organically. If you keep things simple and raise awareness, that will work as it has worked with other solutions. We have a saying that a zebra is a horse designed by a committee. The fediverse was meant to be decentralised and designed to be “wide” within a protocol. So while the adoption may seem to be slow now, it will speed up over time and spread.
Don’t think of these efforts as some form of central planning, but as a simple catalyst.
I realise this now. One of the things I have experienced is that particularly with lemmy, one has to be persistent. I started a group named bengali_convo a few years ago, and it picked up remarkably. But then I did not tend to the group much due to other commitments and the discussion streamed trickled down. I certainly for one, see a huge potential in lemmy and piefed for expansion of #Fediverse and #ActivityPub.
Community growth can vary depending on available alternatives, discovery, and investment (whether monetary or directly with effort, like I am suggesting). Even Reddit publicly admitted that they created numerous fake accounts operated by a couple of people and created content with them to give readers the impression that the site already has users. What I am suggesting does not align with this of course, but the idea that being intentional about growing our community is a good thing in my opinion.
Absolutely. Completely see your point about the intentionality. There may be several approaches is all I am saying.
I’m in.
I already have a bunch of communities I post to daily to try to help grow the fediverse. I could join the effort to boost more.
You want to advertise Lemmy? On Twitter? Like, get Twitter users to leave Twitter for “the Fediverse” as in Lemmy?
Hardly anyone even seems to manage to get Twitter users to leave Twitter for one of the *omas or one of the *keys or any other microblogging server app in the Fediverse that isn’t Mastodon (except for East Asia where the *keys rule supreme). Now you want to get Twitter users to move to a Reddit clone?
Oh, and if your effort should indeed show signs of success, you’ll draw the ire of the fanatic, extremist Mastodon fans upon you who are trying hard to paint the Fediverse as only Mastodon in order to get rid of everything else. And yes, they really exist.
i have a hunch we will get an influx of users again from reddit, once they deploy thier forced popup more and more, lurkers already soured by thier purges they dont log in anymore, once the login is fully required to see content reddit, they will come here.
I’ve tried that with the “Community Ambassadors” idea where people could get content from different sources to help bring content to the curated communities on fediverser. It went largely ignored.
I’m more than willing to try again, however I am tired of instance drama and the tribal mentality that makes people associate a community to “their” instance. So I am not interested in supporting this in any instance that does not have a specific topic or interest group behind.
I like the idea of choosing to focus deeply on enriching the content in certain communities. I think a huge tool in that fight is carefully using an “RSS to Lemmy” bot to pipe good quality feeds of relevant content into communities for further discussion around. If there’s an authoritative blog site that reliably writes good content that’d be relevant to a subLemmy audience, it might be a welcome addition.
The problem with relying on bots for that is that if they post too much content they end overwhelming the members and bringing “organic” output down. Any bot would have to be set up so that it never gets to post more than any “real” member.
Yes, I avoid communities that are just bots reposting stuff. There’s hardly ever any real human engagement and it feels empty. It’s very off-putting.
Then we have a real chicken/egg problem - not enough content to discuss and nobody discussing it.
Take a specific c/ like /us_news as an example. The feed is largely made up of timely posts from specific US news sites that are presumably acceptable to members. They can read a digest of the day’s news and react.
Then take a niche example like c/roguelites. There’s maybe one blog about roguelite games I know of where every post is worth reading, rogueliker.com. In Reddit that blog has its own sub but reposts almost every post into r/roguelites. No one minds because (a) the content is good and (b) there’s enough other organic activity in that sub that it doesn’t feel like it’s all just that blog. We have less organic activity overall here, but I’m trying to think of ways to spur engagement so communities have something going on in them.
In my opinion it’s best to walk up the tree of niche subject until you get to place that’s actually populated. If roguelights are atruggling check/post in strategy or rpg game communities, if those are also empty go up a tier to a more general gaming one. The only reason niche communities are created (outside of like, friend groups or whatever) is because the more general one is becoming over populated. Starting with the small community stuff always felt very backwards to me.
I mean… The other reason to start in a niche is because one is interested in a narrow subset of the wider topic and wants to avoid the bigger, louder, more mainstream content that dominates the conversation. I get that going up to c/games might have more content but if it’s all about Call of Duty and Madden Football, it’s not for me.
I think OP’s idea of boosting human contributions to certain communities could be one of many answers to this problem.
I wish there were more women, people of color, and older people in the fediverse. I want to talk about popculture and punk and food and local news. So I post about those things to make space for other people interested in those topics if they stop by and check it out.
Now that I have my feed curated, I like this place more. But when people first check out the fediverse, places like lemmyshitposting are up front and center and it’s incredibly offputting to see the sexism and pedophilia that’s embraced there as a first impression.
Couldn’t a sub moderator regulate that in real time though? Ideally they shouldn’t have to do too much of that, but in my experience many RSS feeds have a consistent volume of posts per day. I’m talking about choosing 1-2 feeds that post under 10 posts per day total, and an attentive mod could kibosh up to 3-4 if they’re not relevant to what the community wants. Could even put keyword filters on the feeds so relevant posts never hit the sub in the first place.
That’s essentially what I was doing with the “Community Ambassador” feature on fediverser. They could define all types of RSS feeds as sources of content, and there is a button that lets them select and easily create posts on the Lemmy communities.
