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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.