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

1. We create a Lemmy community dedicated to organizing this effort.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.