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Fedigrow @lemm.ee
Elevator7009 @ani.social

Self-promotion restriction rules and Fediverse growth

This is the second time I have been hit with what is essentially "no you can't promote a Lemmy community here, that is against our self-promotion rules." (First was r/otomegames mods not wanting to help with a Fedi otome community or even letting me advertise outside of a Self-Promotion Sunday weekly post nobody looks at. !otomegames@ani.social for the curious. This incident is for promoting !infinitynikki@discuss.tchncs.de, and it feels especially bad because the official, non-Fedi community has official presence on freaking TikTok and posts partnered creators on Discord with Twitch streams and the like, but I can't show a little Reddit alternative for people who want to move off of it. Guess I'd have to start streaming and post exclusively to Fedi or something to get up. Pisses me off.)

Have any Lemmy communities here grown without help from mods on a bigger site? (I know the Datahoarder community moved with the official help of r/datahoarder mods, good on them, I'm curious about communities who didn't get that kind of support.) How did they do it?

3 comments

  • Reddit communities will see fediverse communities as hostile because, well, we are. There are Discord servers and TikTok channels and whatever else associated with these subreddits, but the subreddit mods have a cut of that. They're either friends with the server admins, the channel content producers, or whatever else. These offshoots didn't start up by randos popping in and going "hey, audience, do you want to be somewhere else?"

    Reddit mods are not friends of the fediverse, and drop-in replacements for their thing probably aren't going to be treated kindly.

    You need to backdoor some of this stuff. Post an article or a video on the fediverse for its own sake, and then share that on other platforms, just as one might do with a post from Twitter or a video on YouTube.

    That's the kind of thing Reddit is for, after all -- it's a content aggregator -- and so long as the subs allow similar content from other platforms, you should be able to stay above board. And if they single you out for posting links to content on non-centralized sites while they allow corporate ones to pass freely, then you can kick up a stink before they ban you.

  • Edit: Reading is hard and I misunderstood that this post is about promoting lemmy on reddit. I don't have any experience to contribute with that, but I will leave the rest of my post for posterity.

    By self-promotion, do you mean creating content for youtube/a blog/etc. and then posting it to lemmy? If so, then I think that is fine within reason. In the communities I mod, I have allow self-promotion with these guidelines:

    • Be an active member of the community on other posts too, not just your own content
    • If you post your own content, at least be responsive to questions you might get in the comment section
    • Rate limit your self-promotion so that it doesn't feel spammy (no defined rate, more vibes-based)

    I have a couple posters that have posted article or projects that they have created and been fine. I also have a couple people I have ended up banning because they would just post links to their own content and vanish otherwise.

    All that said, there is a sizable portion of lemmy that seems to chafe against any kind of corporate-controlled social media. So, there is an inbuilt hostility that can exert an outsized influence in smaller communities.