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.
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!
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.
It is great to hear that communities for this purpose already exist. Do you happen to know the mods there?
I agree on letting people know on reddit and twitter. I added point #5 on that. Thank you!
Mod of both here. As you can see on the weekly threads on !fedigrow@lemmy.zip , community builders aren't that many
I'm not that convinced that not responding to "how's everybody doing with their communities" is indicative of anything.
Those threads used to be more active a few months ago. A lot of regular posters have reduced their activity (myself includes)
I struggle to imagine what would be a possible meaningful answer.
"I've hand 15 posts and 6 comments in the 11 communities I moderate, but the mood on this part of the world is gloomy because of politics"?
https://piefed.zip/post/1703100#comment_6432658
Thanks! This is a really important one. Only if we had a way to convert these pain points to action points and organize financial support for the effort to address them...
I must say that the masto5 post felt like really a big step in this direction, but the threadiverse has still to get the academic and institutional support mastodon has managed to achieve.
I think there are a lot of people who might want to help, but don't have the time/energy/experience to organize it
I'm supportive of this, and happy to help where appropriate :) Please feel free to tag me in future posts about this, in case I miss it
If you can, I would prefer that you use the existing communities for this project because there's no need to dilute efforts further. Also, see if you can create a Mastodon account where you post those announcements too, because that's a large userbase that is already familiar with what this place is and can even post from their accounts
appreciate your advice and willingness to participate! I agree and will do that.
If you're on topic and don't break the groups' rules, I don't think you'd need privileged contact to the moderatos. Maybe make a post every week for things like community spotlights, community revivals, engaging topics, etc.?
Also, the more people interact, the more contents propagate, kinda like an algorithm but more analogical. So engaging more should boost organic growth.
And there being people from different places in here, betting on one type of content is imo risky. Better I think would be to just post what you'd like to see, and other like-minded folk may notice.
Now, on what Die4Ever said...
Something that hadn't crossed my mind but that was noted to me when I gave a similar idea is that doing so against direct competitors could be seen as sabotage, and moderator action would very likely come. Not in those words but in this idea though.
Better I think is to prioritize the fediverse in a passive or at least non-antagonistic manner.
Some other ideas I forgot to add to the other comment
Have some mechanism for people to suggest which niches get worked on, and then have one person decide on the schedule. Else it gets disorganized
Shorten the cycles to a few weeks rather than months. I feel like people will get impatient if they need to wait months to get past a niche they don't care about. Two weeks might be a nicer starting point, and then you can adjust it up or down?
Do outreach about the project all over the place, and not just in fedigrow. Fedigrow reaches the involved and active people, but not everyone else that might be interested in the theme. For example:
While you can prioritize one community, don't restrict it to that one. It will be easier to find people interested in crafts, compared to say crochet specifically. Also people can have strong feelings about which specific community or instance is best, and some users might refuse to post to an instance they don't agree with. So if you give a list of which communities you want to grow, it might go over better