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.
Agree, but one thing to easily improve this is better federation with mastodon.
How many of the posts that you see in your feed come from mastodon? For me it’s probably less than 5%. Well guess what, mastodon users are about 90% of all fediverse users. stats (active mastodon users: 1.5M, active lemmy users: 36k)
Why don’t we see the large amount of already-existing content from mastodon?
(If you want to make as much content for lemmy, as is already existing for mastodon, we’d need about 1.5M new users. instead one technological change could get us there too.)
This has its own hurdles.
Mastodon has exactly zero support for groups. Most of its users don’t even know that the Fediverse has groups. Mastodon is all about user accounts following user accounts.
Lemmy, on the other hand, is all about groups. User accounts literally can’t follow other user accounts. Completely different technological philosophies.
Then there’s the inevitable culture clash.
Make Lemmy more well-known on Mastodon, and you’ll have gaggles of Mastodon extremists barging into Lemmy, behaving like they’re still on Mastodon (well, technically, they are) and trying to force Mastodon’s culture upon Lemmy.
Like, CW’ing posts that someone on Mastodon might find sensitive (Lemmy doesn’t even have this feature), cutting “long posts” with over 500 characters into threads of itty-bitty pieces of no more than 500 characters, using the right hashtags for content discovery (Lemmy doesn’t even support hashtags) and visibly mentioning everyone your comment will go to because Mastodon users are apparently easily freaked out by posts that don’t come from someone whom they follow, and that don’t mention them either.
They will clash with Lemmy users and, more importantly, Lemmy moderators who live by Lemmy’s culture which is almost identical to Reddit’s, and which has exactly nothing to do with Mastodon’s culture.
Also, Lemmy’s enclosed threaded conversations will clash with Mastodon which doesn’t have any support for enclosed threaded conversations whatsoever. Something that especially Hubzilla, (streams), Forte and Mitra have to struggle with because they’ve implemented FEP-171b “Conversation Containers” which is completely and utterly incompatible with how Mastodon works. From Mastodon’s point of view, both Hubzilla and its descendants and the whole Threadiverse are “broken”.
The result: Mastodon users will block tons of Lemmy users. Mastodon users will demand entire Lemmy servers be Fediblocked. Entire Lemmy servers will end up on subscribable Mastodon blocklists for behaving too “un-Mastodon-like”. Lemmy servers, in turn, will defederate from tons of Mastodon servers. Once enough big Lemmy servers have blocked mastodon.social (which is 22% of the whole Fediverse, and which is chock-full of the most clueless Mastodon users), it’s game over.
you’re writing as if you know what users want. let people decide themselves please. allow mastodon<->lemmy federation, make it an optional feature that you can activate on sign-up or in your profile setting. this way everyone is happy.
https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta@piefed.social/p/2285233/piefed-v1-7-11-is-released-finding-and-adding-people-to-follow-posts-from-rss-feeds-and
hmm, when i copy-paste your username into my mastodon instance search field, i get:
so i can see your user profile. however, it reports as “0 Posts” and when i scroll down, i do get a few of your posts/comments, but only very few (like 20 in total maybe).
this is what i meant when i talk about a lack of compatibility between lemmy/piefed and mastodon.
The change to Piefed linked above is from 5 days ago, that’s probably why only recent posts show up.