How can we boost Lemmy membership?
How can we boost Lemmy membership?
Since my favorite reddit app came to Lemmy I'm really keen on getting more people into the fediverse to pump up the volume of content around here. Are there any initiatives that we can assist to get folks onboard?
I had my wife join, and she likes it, but laments the slow pace of new material in the communities.
laments the slow pace of new material in the communities.
Participation. We need more of it. Like...a lot more of it.
Lurkers shouldn't lurk, and people should give others the benefit of the doubt far more often than they ever did on Reddit, if they ever did at all. Make Lemmy a community where engagement is valuable and fun and actually useful.
We need a better site to link to than join-lemmy.org. It should concisely pitch lemmy to everyday users and suggest an instance for them to sign up at. Don't get into the weeds about federation or choosing instances or selecting apps. Just select a sane default and point people to it. Rotate defaults to avoid overloading a given instance or making it too powerful.
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We need to cut back the bot traffic a touch. All new people coming and see are a million posts with no participation. It's good to have the content but we're kind of lacking in curation and a lot of what's coming over is not stuff we're interested in commenting on. As long as we just keep carbon copying Reddit and Twitter and the Verge and hundreds of other places, we're going to have a lot of empty post sitting around.
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Actual discourse and discussion needs to happen. We're fairly low on trolls currently, which is a fantastic thing. But we also don't have a lot of spicy takes either.
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More moderation, administration tools, better filters, easier ways to shut out bad actors. Right now the best we can do is defederate when somebody can't manage their clientele. And we're still way too bot-able.
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More migration tools something I can to what mastodon does if you need to move instances.
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Make valuable original content here that's not found elsewhere, post and comment thoughtfully as much as possible(No. Pun. Chains). Don't try to turn this place into reddit, be better than reddit.
People who are on reddit that wanted to come here right now has already done so, so it's important to drew in people who has never used reddit before here instead of always waiting for reddit to do something stupid.
Also less celeb gossip please, need a place where I can get away from that on the Internet.
Don't focus on looking for ways to find new members. Focus on ways to make people who find the fediverse want to stay. Accomplish that by putting something here that they like to see and want to see again.
When they join the Fediverse, or when they come to visit and consider joining, they're going to search for the stuff they want to see. They might look for memes, but more likely, they're going to look for their hobbies. If the only hobbies reflected here are gaming and programming and the fediverse itself, most people are not going to want to stay, the userbase is going to develop an even heavier bias towards certain types of people, it will become more alienating to other types of people, and it will stagnate.
Make an effort to post about and comment about other things. Cooking, movies, TV, sports, fashion, hair, plants, decor, architecture, history, religion, travel, a nearby city or town. Join those communities. Remember, when you see a cool article about nutrition, or a cool video guide to Copenhagen that you think people will enjoy, share it here. Post it, even if the community is small and you don't think people will care, because we need to seed communities with something. This is what I've been doing in a few communities, but mostly in !malefashionadvice. It's been frustrating, I haven't really been able to build the community up yet, but it's okay.
While we're at it, don't alienate people by posting, commenting about, or upvoting things that... suck. Keep all forms of bigotry at the door. If you're a hardcore libertarian or tankie or militant atheist... I'm not going to tell you to stop believing what you believe, but try to cool it, like 10%? Please? Nobody wants you breathing down their throats with extremism.
And... I've done this too, but let's make sure that we're not focusing too much on meta posts. They can be worthwhile, but they also are not what new people want to see.
CW: Unpopular opinion?
I've looked back at a few reddit threads, and I'm thankful most of those users aren't coming here. I'm alright with the current level of content and participation. What little there is here is still better than most of what's on r/all, and it's not like we want to attract advertisers and self-promoting accounts.
- Publish useful content on lemmy. Link to that content on other social media sites
- Anytime you see a negative article about reddit particularly on reddit, remind users this will continue to get worse, link them to lemmy and explain what it is/how to join.
- Donate to lemmy development to improve UX.
If we could stop pretending we're superior to other social media that might be a start. The number of posts talking shit about the "average redditor" or suggesting that we need more "high quality content than reddit", or that everything needs to have a meaningful discussion is exhausting. We as a group seem to want to dictate who can comment, who can post, what kind of post is acceptable, and are fairly mean to newer people. You won't keep new people if you're rude to them or they see post after post trashing them.
Engagement comes at the price of low effort sometimes. So does content. Not every post or comment will be a shining beacon of perfection. Sometimes people just want to talk. Some of them are starved for human interaction.
Stop trash talking the lurkers. They may be sharing what content there is here and driving people to Lemmy instances. They're an important part of the ecosystem.
Ask what caliber of people you want here. Because it is very apparent to me that the loudest members only want a specific type of community member here. And they are very outspoken about that fact. But are they actively extending a hand to those people when they encounter them on any other platform? Word of mouth (or keyboard) works. It's slow but it works.
Might've missed it but I haven't seen anyone say "Make it not awful to use"
It's helpful to say that we need better onboarding infographics to simplify explaining how to use Lemmy, but also, Lemmy needs to be easier to use. Finding and following communities is far too complicated.
I come here everyday out of sheer bloody mindedness because I want it to work, not because I enjoy it. Yet.
Give it time. The platform exploded in popularity in a few months, let us [current users] let the last batch of newcomers to settle in before calling more folks in. Plus we don't even have much control over it, at the end of the day Lemmy grows as Reddit does stupid shit that makes it lose trust with its userbase.
If you build it, they will come.
It's the reason I've been motivated to post as much as I do, both in broader communities and a handful of niche ones that I want to see grow.
If you've thought about posting/commenting but just haven't yet, take the plunge! I never used to post on reddit at all, and I've been pretty active since joining Lemmy.
Unfortunately it's just a waiting game really, we grow slowly. Bringing people over is good, but they'll follow the content. As people come, posters will come too, and commenters, and then that's what ultimately brings over the rest.
Post things relevant to a hobby or interest that isn't Lemmy itself or something closely related.
Linking to Lemmy image posts is a bad experience. This use case needs to be much better because content is the main way that non-Lemmy users can be motivated to join Lemmy. I tried to share this with a friend yesterday, and had to explain that the image I actually wanted them to see is locked behind a tiny thumbnail, and that the full size Good Place Janet someone commented is not what I wanted them to see (at least not without the context of the posted image).
There's no way to open a shared Lemmy link in your client of choice. You can manually add URLs on Android, but you have to do that for every Lemmy instance, so that's not going to fly. I don't know if there's any solution at all on iOS.
There's not a good way to control what content I see. It's essentially either "everything" or "a single community". On Reddit, you could already have multiple communities about the same topic on Reddit, but usually one was dominant, and you had multireddits to save you if there truly are a few good related subreddits. Now on Lemmy, you multiply that problem by N instances, and subtract the multireddit feature. This situation simply must be made better somehow.
Let it happen organically. It will happen in waves.
I say we should dress up in nice suits, and go door to door asking if people have heard of our great community haven, thanks to the Great Lemming who we keep forgetting the name of. Ramen.
Most people are familiar with the reddit app. There should be a "reddit for lemmy" app that is as terrible as the reddit app
Relay for Reddit stopped working for me today. I won't pay for content I partly create, so my shift will be final to Lemmy, unless my social media addiction finds another way.
Thing is, what Reddit still has, is the available history of content. If Lemmy has new topics and new content, it will at one point become second nature to also add "Lemmy" to a search query. And at some point hopefully without Reddit ever crossing the mind. For now it's a slow and painful process as contribution is the only way to push Lemmy.
So whatever you do, contribute as much as possible. Then we can do it. I'd say push the bigger communities first, the smaller will follow, like how it was with early Reddit.
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we could offer every new member a free pony and maybe a soft drink of their choice
That's the struggle at first, getting a deluge of users that keep people both entertained, AND posting content.
Unfortunately I don't think we've reached that number of users yet and it throws us into a vicious cycle of losing users who were also posters.
I'm not sure how to grow it on our end, other than continuing to contribute to the communities, but I do know that if Reddit keeps following Elon's business decisions, they may end up losing many users as well.
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Growing naturally is the best way. No advertising is necessary, not if you like it how it is.
When a platform grows too fast it loses it's identity. If I had to bet I'd guess the recent migration has already stretched what identity Lemmy had before.
- Participate. Comment, post, mod, support the software, make tools to help new users, donate to instance providers, write blog posts, review apps, whatever you're interested in and can do. Don't force yourself too hard cause this is still supposed to be fun and nobody benefits from burnout.
- BE KIND. The more of a wholesome, open community we can create, the better. Don't feed the trolls. Report and move on.
- If you're on other social media, maybe include a link to lemmy somewhere. Cross post lemmy posts, that kind of thing. PR never hurts. Try to stay away from "Lemmy army" kind of posts cause that usually pushes people away more than inviting them in.
All this being said, I'm not sure Lemmy is new-user friendly enough to expand quickly right now. I want my technology illiterate grandma to be able to sign up and use it without help. It's been amazing to join and be a part of this community. Like a lot of others I came here after Reddit API changes and I've loved seeing Lemmy grow.
Gotta make the transitional learning curve almost 0.
Namely give people a solid app to use (I use Thunder, which is a near clone to the reddit apk called relay for reddit) and implement a way to set up a screen name easier than having to "mysteriously track down some strange thing called an instance" and create your name there and then going and finding the apk to use and logging in under your instance and screen name and password.
It's a turn off to how easy literally everything else on the internet is to set up. We need an apk that has a "new to lemmy" walk-through that explains how to navigate and sets you up with a login and instance. An apk with a 5 minute set up tutorial to get you started up and using lemmy would go a long ways in people coming and staying.
Actually, the people who would only bother with the fediverse if it had more content are exactly the people I don't want here.
But please pump up good content. not just low effort re-posts.
Content rate needs to go up, I agree, but the biggest source of content in comparable social media came from something I'd like to avoid: power users.
Since most can't help on the technical side of things, you can really help with creating communities. Hopefully the scaled sort helps a lot of issues with smaller communities getting buried.
As a lurker who doesn't post much:
Improve the quality of the platform. Fix the moderation issues. Find a solution to communities being fragmented across multiple servers. Keep improving reliability. And so on.
It will be slower but I think we will get there.
I don’t think Lemmy will turn into “marketing platform” that Reddit is now . And I’m thankful for that!
I try to share links as much as I can.
Maybe moving discussion out of the censored lemmy.ml instance would help
Freedom of spech, lol
I switched over from sync when boost released cause I love the columns view for posts.
Spicy maymays
Copying this from another post of mine:
The thing that kind of sucks about lemmy is there isn’t really any protection against fascists on the site. One of the reasons it took me so long to get off reddit is because there you have access to tools that let you see if someone you’re interacting with is an overt and open fascist, but nothing like that really exists here. In fact, it’s even worse here because the fascists will aggressively downvote to the point where anything directly calling out white supremacy gets absolutely slammed. Now you have a bunch of reddit frogs coming over here and the only real hint that they’re going to cause trouble is if their username ends in @lemmy.world or @feddit.de
The domain block is a bare minimum, I never want the displeasure of having to deal with a feddit,de poster ever again. Another thing they need to do is make votes public so I can clean house of people upvoting blatantly abusive comments or partaking in downvote harassment. Third they need to add tagging and user-level vote counts so you can identify known trolls without needing to commit their usernames to memory. Those three changes would go a long way in fixing a lot of the biggest problems with lemmy as a whole.
EDIT: And blocking a user shouldn’t delete them completely from your client but rather hide them. That way you can follow their comment streams looking for people supporting them and wipe them out in the process. The current system gives every comment below the original carte blanche to say whatever and there’s fuck all you can do about it because as far as you know, they don’t even exist.
Nudes