Reinvestment
Regardless of where the loss in users is coming from the major takeaway here is that we are firmly in a reinvestment phase. This will likely last until Reddit does something stupid related to the IPO but in the absence of that we will probably not see a significant uptick in growth again without major improvements to the threadiverse as a whole. That means that those of us who are personally invested in the growth of the threadiverse should be taking this time to develop the tools and features necessary to weather the next wave more gracefully than the last.
Niche Community Growth
One of the biggest issue I see here is still community growth. Growing certain communities is significantly harder than others and if you don’t have a lot of crossposting potential it can be damn near impossible. As it stands, I do not see a way to fix this situation without a hot and active ranking system that takes into account the number of users active in the particular community. As part of a change like this I think we would be best served by consolidating a significant portion of the small dead communities. I think we should also strongly prefer specialized instances like lemmy.film or literature.cafe to truly take advantage of the special attention these sorts of instances are capable of providing particular topics. As it stands only a handful of them have enough broader threadiverse activity to be truly useful.
Recruiting From Mastodon
At this point it seems like we are unlikely to pull a significant amount of users from Reddit without more reddit-policy-driven migration, but there are tons of highly educated and engaged users over on Mastodon that would make serious positive contributions to the tone and quality of the discourse over here. For some reason there seems to be minimal overlap between the two communities and that blows my mind. Not only that but I actively see folks disparaging Mastodon in fediverse related communities on a regular basis (and even sometimes in the Mastodon communities themselves). As far as I can tell, these are largely lingering sentiments from a Reddit/Twitter dichotomy. Remember, as things develop the lines between threaded social media and microblogging are likely to blur. A significant number of Mastodon apps already provide a threaded view and one of kbins explicit goals is very much to bridge the gap. With this in mind, Mastodon (and federated microblogging more generally) seems like the best source for new potential users.
TLDR
TL;DR: What I’d like to particularly emphasize here is the focus on Mastodon user recruitment. They are far more likely to both improve the quality of discourse here and contribute to community building than your average reddit user. Not to mention they can already be active from their existing accounts. The barrier for entry is nil. I think a valid strat to go about this is to advertise existing specialized instances to their existing equivalent communities on the microblogging fediverse. This solves both the problems of growing the specialized instances from 0 and making their discourse substantially different enough to warrant specialized instances in the first place. Things like:
- #bookstodon to literature.cafe
- #monsterdon to lemmy.film
- #climateemergency to slrpnk.net
- #histodon to some equivalent of ask historians (This is probably the only way we’d get the experts needed)
- Any of the many art tags to lemmyloves.art
For some reason there seems to be minimal overlap between the two communities and that blows my mind.
There seems to be completely different cultures IMO
- Quote replies are normal on lemmy, but controversial on mastodon
- Full text search is normal on lemmy, but, again, controversial on mastodon.
- A significant proportion of lemmy users seem to dislike defederation, or at least view it as a last resort, while it seems to happen at the drop of a hat on mastodon.
At least that’s the impression I’ve got from my limited attempts to use mastodon.
I don’t think the folks that have those sorts of qualms are necessarily the people to go after. I think the prime targets should be field experts. They were essential in establishing Reddit’s utility in the early days and there seem to be a fairly significant number of them over on Mastodon in search of deeper conversation.
Note: I am primarily on Mastodon and have been on-and-off since 2017.
I don’t know how much success you will have in the short term trying to pull “field experts” from Mastodon to engage on Lemmy. The vast majority of current Mastodon users came from big Twitter and Tumblr waves, not Reddit. There are different expectations re: etiquette and moderation between the two platforms, and Lemmy doesn’t have some of the moderation / privacy / security features that Mastodon users like.
Plus, a lot (not all) Mastodon users dislike Reddit’s culture and unfortunately, Lemmy has seen a sharp turn to mirroring that culture. Even I have been increasingly turned off in recent weeks; it’s only because I’m on Beehaw that I’ve found the Lemmy experience bearable.
That’s why I’m specifically suggesting we try to get them on the specialized instances. Where culture and moderation policies are least similar from Reddit. Somebody else pointed this out in the other thread and I do absolutely think if we don’t point them to a specialized instances then beehaw is the place to go.
For some reason there seems to be minimal overlap between the two communities and that blows my mind.
I’m not surprised at all. Microblogging is kinda hard to get. When I want to participate in some online social space, I lurk a bit on there to get the general vibe and then start or join discussion. Yesterday I tried to get into microblogging fedi (mastodon, firefish, akkoma) and I couldn’t get past lurking part because interaction on microblogging social media seems so fractured. And a lot of posts on Lemmy indicate similar problems people encounter on mastodon.
And weird names for tages aren’t helping at all
Ya I have tried several times over the years to get into twitter, mastodon, etc. I hate it. Do not understand why it has any appeal.
Do you think there would be similar frustration points in the Mastodon to Lemmy process? Obviously, I am ok with both so this may be a major blindspot of mine, but I suspect that may be a slightly easier transition.
Also those aren’t weird names for tags they are more like existing communities. Because Mastodon does not have native groups there are several implementations like https://a.gup.pe to fill the gap. Following tags like that is a similar way to go about it. They are distinct from #books or #horror. #monsterdon in particular is a weekly monster movie watch party. The point is that these are active communities with a lot of crossover potential.
Do you think there would be similar frustration points in the Mastodon to Lemmy process?
Nah, Lemmy style discussions are everywhere nowadays: youtube comment section, facebook groups, forums of all kinds. I think most Internet users are familiar with at least one of these. It’s just that microblogging can be confusing if you never used it before.
I think Mastodon adds up to the frustation Lemmy users experience with microblogging software with their really bad and familiar web UI and strict word limit. I think we would be more successful if we’re starting with -oma or firefish honestly. But most guides for Fediverse written for Mastodon unfortunately, and you’ll need to learn about how the federation between mastodon and rest of microblogging fedi works to get some content.
Also those aren’t weird names for tags they are more like existing communities.
Yeah, sorry, ‘weird’ isn’t the best word to describe it. They’re more like not that obvious - if you just got into mastodon and want to check what people posting there, you’ll need to figure out first what these tags even mean.
Maybe we could build a few communities on Lemmy that would use tags to get traction on Mastodon so users outside of Thrediverse could learn about our existance? I’m pretty sure most Mastodon users don’t really know about the whole reddit thing and that we now have second entryway to Fediverse.
As it stands, I do not see a way to fix this situation without a hot and active ranking system that takes into account the number of users active in the particular community
lemmy equivalent of multireddits (which is the issue on github with the most “thumbs up”) could be useful here, i have multireddits that contain low frequency posting but i still use the front page for “regular stuff”.
As an example. This is the sort of post I’m talking about: https://tech.lgbt/@spaduf/110941439731236455
@bookstodon Not sure if this is anybody’s cup of tea but there’s a new Lemmy instance dedicated to books and writing over at: https://literature.cafe
The best part is you can participate from your existing fediverse account. Communities on Lemmy can be followed like users and have similar functionality to a.gup.pe groups!
Try following @fiction as an example but remember that federation doesn’t backfill.
More communities can be found here: https://literature.cafe/communities
Already sitting at about 8 boosts and several favorites from some folks with a fairly large follower count. That means potentially thousands of eyes. I went ahead and put together a dedicated user as I think that may be more appropriate than spam posting Lemmy communities/instances on my personal account. Not sure when I’ll have time to flesh it out and make it active but I’ve already got a list of communities/instances and what groups I think would be interested in them. Find it here:
https://mastodon.social/@lemmy_for_mastodonThe transparency and attitude around open source devs like y’all is fantastic. Truly an inspiration
