Just making sure I'm in the right place. I cannot see any developed communities here so I've started wondering, what's the real place everyone from Reddit has moved to? I've heard something about Discuit, but never tried it.
Another ex redditor here. The issue seems to be that a lot of people created communities but never bothered to post something. Even my little ubuntu server community has nearly 90 subscribers by now.
We should work on more visible „you‘re here, what to do next“. Something like „go to communities tab, all, subscribe to each one you like“, missing any? Make them yourselves, but dont forget to post on them since very few people will subscribe to an empty community. 10-20 posts over a month should be a good start. Generally avoid bots since they dont boost interaction at all (my personal impression).
Or a reminder for people who have made communities but no posts. That would stress them a bit I suppose but I thought I‘d bring the idea to the table.
I think a lot of people don't realize just how much content on Reddit was being posted by bots. Also, the culture here is a lot more accepting of posting and commenting days or weeks apart, more like an old-school forum. Whereas on Reddit I would have thought someone was weird if they were commenting on a post I made a week ago, here it's not that weird. It means discussions can go on a bit longer.
I agree 100%. Commenting on an old post was different over there. But I think my original point still stands. Peeps who want this place to thrive need to make a post every now and then. :)
I didn't frequently post new threads on reddit either. The great thing about the structure of reddit and Lemmy (as opposed to that of e.g. Twitter/Mastodon) is you don't really need to have your own ideas what to post, you can look at what others have posted and then react to that by adding your thoughts. But of course if everybody did only that, then there wouldn't be anything to react to, and that may be kinda the problem right now.
Exactly. You hit the nail on the head imo. I didn’t even think about this particular mechanic until you mentioned it.
People are so used go „reaction content“ and „reacting“ passively that this place does not grow as fast as it probably could if people were more creative. Creativity is like a muscle. If you don’t train it, it’s really weak.
So, I think it’s very much a good idea to put some easily visible „suggestion“ somewhere that this place will improve as much as you make it by posting original content ie questions and ideas.
Yeah I'm definitely much more of a commenter than a poster. In the early weeks I was really trying to post but I kinda ran out of steam.
But of course if everybody did only that, then there wouldn’t be anything to react to, and that may be kinda the problem right now.
You're right, we have plenty of users with insightful viewpoints, but there is a dearth of posts and content for them to talk about. Also, let's not forget that the sorting algorithm isn't great right now and a lot of people aren't seeing enough of the content that does exist.
A large issue is that what would be one subreddit is now a dozen different communities. What would fix this is allowing communities to "federate".
Let's say you had news@europe.site and europenews@lemmy.site.
The mods could have the option to consolidate with each other. Each would have to agree to the move and could revoke that access at any time. If one instance goes down, the other still retains their posts. Both of them would still exist on their own, but anything made on one would automatically be published on the other.
This could have multiple levels.
At the most basic, posts are just automatically brought over between each community. The mods can take action that only affects their local instance.
You can then add an option to federate with the other community and any community they federate with. Mods are presented with options to disallow some of those communities if they choose.
Each community can then set moderation levels and permissions. There could be an option to retain moderation on federated posts made on the other instance for their local posts. IE if europenews@lemmy.site removes a post made on europenews@lemmy.site, news@europe.site can choose to have it removed there.
You can also choose to grant full mod powers to other communities. So if europenews@lemmy.site removes any post, even one made on news@europe.site, it would automatically be removed from news@europe.site.
This would alleviate the fractures caused by multiple communities without losing the benefits of federation.
This is a really interesting idea. It would address one of the biggest hurdles I've had with full Lemmy adoption. I find a lot of the communities for many topics can be fractured with seemingly duplicative communities. It could also allow the larger user base to decrease the dependency on a particular instance.