If you want your community to grow, there’s things you can do to help. Some of them are better than others. What are things that are good for the Fediverse, and what are some things that are better left on other platforms? Here’s a few things and my opinions
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Clickbaity titles (“Liberals DESTROYED by LOGIC”) - No thank you.
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Consistent posting - Yes. If you start a community, you’ll probably be the only one posting on there for a while. It’s easier to bootstrap a community if it’s something that comes with content ready-to-go somehow to make your job easier.
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GIFs - I’ve been using this over in [email protected]. That’s about as growth-hacky as I’d like to get, but I’m pretty sure people are more likely to engage with animated GIFs than static images for communities like that.
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Sources - I think this is something that can differentiate the Fediverse from other platforms. On my posts in [email protected], I’ve been spending time to source everything before posting it. This makes sure I don’t accidentally post edited images that I’ve seen over in /r/outofcontextcomics, and makes the Fediverse show up in searches. That actually probably hurts growth a little bit, but IMO is worth it
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Transcribing - Another differentiator for the Fediverse. Everything’s been done by hand and it’s been great. I’ve been transcribing my posts in [email protected] and I’ve been very happy to see that search engines are already picking those up.
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Transcribing as a growth hack is cool because it’s also more accessibility for disabled people. Probably even more helpful if you put your transcription of images as alt text.
I’ve always seen sourcing more as a preemptive “someone’s going to ask where I got it from” or a personal ethics thing you might do if you value it, not growth hacking.
Clickbait is a push-away factor for me. I’m not here for outrage.
Clickbait is a push-away factor for me. I’m not here for outrage.
I think most users here would agree with you (I certainly do). There are dozens of apps out there that scroll the same memes endlessly and trying to make Lemmy competitive in the marketplace for attention by imitating that format will fail. I think the best strategy for Lemmy-growers is to lean into the strengths of the Fediverse by hosting discussions and communities that the Reddit algorithm suppresses.
This is a good thought provoking post, but I think most of the methods you describe here actually work against the Fediverse, both in terms of desired outcomes and actual growth.
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If a user comes to Lemmy (for example) and sees the same stale meme feed and engagement bait they see on Reddit, what’s the incentive to switch? What makes Lemmy unique?
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Of the users who are here and understand the reasons for not using commercial social media, most are probably trying to avoid the bulk of the sort of content made by the suggestions you give.
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Growth-for-growth’s-sake puts more burden on instance admins for reasons that don’t involve growing a sense of community (presumably the reason they are investing time in the first place).
My point is that Lemmy can never compete with Reddit in terms of attention and distractability and trying to build “community” around that here will always fail. We should lean into Lemmy’s strengths, focus on growing communities and discussions and the kind of thing the Reddit algorithm suppresses.
Yeah, to be clear, I just mention clickbait titles to say “no thank you”, and the Fediverse doesn’t need that.
I’m borrowing the term “growth hacking” from the VC “growth at all costs” community, but using it as more of a comparison. Growth is good, but uncontrolled growth is called cancer. How can we cultivate good, healthy growth, and what goes too far?
I think GIFs are kind of in a grey area. They can start to create the same stale meme feed as you mention, but if there’s some meat underneath that, that makes people stick around, then I think it’s worth it.
By posting consistently, I don’t mean spamming. It’s more “try to be active”. You can’t start a community by assuming “if you build it, they will come”. As an example, I started moderating [email protected], and I’ve helped it out by posting interesting local news articles. I don’t just automatically repost everything though, that would be too spammy. I read the papers and specifically think about what articles would be interesting to post there.
Ah I got you, yes I totally agree. And I also do think gifs and shitposts etc can be shared and engaged with in an organic way that doesn’t force out slower content, which is also partly why active moderation is so important.
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If its a non-meme community, like an actual serious topic. Post memes about it.
Post images instead of text. (Look at the bad facts community. Can’t remember the exact name.) That guy gets it.
Personally the name and image of the community make a bit of difference to me. Although not much.
Post images instead of text
I wanted to keep [email protected] discussion-focused instead of just imagespam of otome game characters. I’m not budging on that but given this is the advice for growth, oof for potential growth. I do welcome memes about otome games, but just reposting someone else’s fanart is against the rules. Posting your own is welcome.
One thing I always wanted more of out of anime/manga communities on Reddit was more discussion, less fanart I could easily find by just going on Pixiv—but each community was almost always imagespam.
I guess this puts me in the minority :(
On the other hand, Reddit’s r/otomegames is the same way, there is more discussion than imagespam, so there is hope.
Recently, in [email protected], I configured the episode discussion bot to create posts using the poster art of the show rather than just an empty discussion post as a bit of an experiment about the effect of images. I don’t have hard analytics to dig into, but I have noticed that the episode discussion threads have garnered significantly more votes when they have images, and a small increase in comments. Though, the additional comments are usually just wandering folks instead of people that stick around and engage.
I still don’t let fanart in either the main anime nor manga community because it would too quickly spiral out of control. There is simply too much fanart in existence for these things. Instead, I limit it to official art only, which usually means teasers/posters/trailers. In the manga community, there is a bit of a special case in that I do allow fanart of a series if it was done by a different published author (not just some random pixiv user). This happens sometimes when a series ends and you get other authors drawing commemorative art for it.
Hey, thanks for the advice! I’ll try to implement it when I can—some posts lend themselves better to images than others.
I admit I’m one of the wanderers. I pop in via Local from time to time because sometimes there is cool stuff, but I’m not subbed because otherwise stuff I’m not interested in would overwhelm my feed. A quick skim via checking in from time to time or Local works better for me.
I see you as a mod a lot around Lemmy. Thanks for your work!
Low Quality Facts. He’s one of the best things on Mastodon these days.
Do you think memes and serious content belong in the same community? Maybe they don’t if you’re huge but the Fediverse is small enough that we shouldn’t be splitting communities so readily?
You’ve pointed out both sides yourself there. I’d say if its a new and struggling community allow it. If its a big community and there’s other relates communities, don’t.
Say science memes exists, so don’t post memes in other science communities. But there are other communities where it makes sense.
Whenever you see content that would fit in other communities, mention them in a comment. Even if it isn’t consequently cross posted there, people looking at the post are likely to be interested, leading to discovery.
One I use, is stagger crossposts.
If you’re not sharing something time sensitive, post to each relevant community with several hours of time delay inbetween. (I often do days or even weeks)
This will prevent the usual de-duplication of the posts, thereby preventing the biggest post from cannibalizing the upvotes from the rest, and is a soft excuse to repost something a few times.
People will discover the communities which were posted to earlier, from the newr posts. I try to go from smallest to biggest in order, as the first will benefit the most.
I try to go from smallest to biggest in order, as the first will benefit the most.
Neat! I independently came to the same conclusion!
This will prevent the usual de-duplication of the posts, thereby preventing the biggest post from cannibalizing the upvotes from the rest
There should probably be an easy way to upvote the crossposts without visiting each one
I filed an issue on Github for this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2825
I’m not convinced there should be. I think any feature that treats different commumities as somehow the same thing, even if they have the same content, is ultimately bad for the ecosystem. It trains users to see communities as interchanheable, and to see value in Lemmy and the fesiverse primarily in consumption, rather than discussion.
We can’t compete on consumption. It won’t sustain this space.
One of the things that I think we can make better use of here is partnerships with other groups (communities, magazines, what have you). This is especially useful with other on-server groups, for several reasons, but it’s generally applicable. Building a web of trust and engagement can go a long way. Obviously, forced, artifical engagement-for-engagement isn’t the goal, but creating a sense of “these are other spaces we support” can be big.
Personally, I’m a proponent of themed servers, but that’s a step earlier than what we’re talking about here. But having servers focused on certain topics can help keep moderators and admins engaged, potentially reduce inter-node communication, reduce federation issues, etc. Plus, it comes with some of that “trust network” built right in.
Yeah, it would be great to see partnerships in the sense of like comments sections for magazines hosted on Lemmy or something. Not sure if that’s what you’re talking about, but that would be a neat Fediverse feature.
One of the things that I think we can make better use of here is partnerships with other groups (communities, magazines, what have you).
Very true. I’m the main poster on [email protected], but if I find an article about an animated movie, I post it to [email protected] to help @[email protected]’s community
We also have each other’s communities linked in the sidebars
Not knocking you, but that’s a lot of work for little to no reward. Once it starts feeling like work, I stop. The point for me, is that it’s for fun once it stops being that, or if, then kinda like, why am I doing this for?
The Down Voting
This to me at least, defeats the purpose of doing extensive ‘work’ for posting in communities. Especially when, lemmy has a specific audience: political, techy, anime, videos games, computing, u get the idea.
In my view, fedi/lemmy not having mainstream or normie appeal, it won’t really grow. Factor in heavy handed politcal ideological admining/moderation, you have to ask yourself, who would want to see that all the time and deal with that all the time, when they can just put in a #memes hashtag on X, mewe, Facebook, instagram, or threads, and also post pretty much whatever they want, (Their opinions, food, pets, random life stuff) without having to deal with community rules or some politically motivated ‘mod’.
Why do u think they’re r like almost zero reddit alternatives? Most ppl aren’t interested in forums and the way they operate. Ppl like it easy and simple
Id like for lemmy to grow and be much more diverse in terms of users. Content, opinions, but sadly that just will never happen. And i think it’s meant/intended to be that way. A left leaning space which does not want any outsiders or anything or anyone mainstream.
There’s also too many passive users and too many lurkers. If u want a social media site/app to succeed, u need The content creators and active users. Those are the users who are going to bring more ppl.
But lemmy is not that.
Most users are far too politically extreme, only lurk, remove what they don’t agree with or like, ban ppl left and right (Dissinsentivizing activity) and down vote pretty much any and everything that isn’t the core content. (Anime, left wing politics, computing and tech)
