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 2โ3 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.
When thinking about the problem of how to make Lemmy and the Fedi a rich source of content and engagement, I think about the early social web in around 2008/09, about Tumblr, specifically.
Tumblr came later to the party, after the first wave of Web2.0 tools (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, Wordpress, Blogger, and the like) had staked out major market share and become the default tool in its specific niche use case. Rather than competing with those tools head on, Tumblr marketed itself as a "tumble-log" -- a place to pull together feeds from all your other disparate social presences into one coherent feed that could serve as a personal home page feed. Even though it was functionally just a blog, it was a blog designed to make it extremely easy to pipe in content from your other social presences and curate a personal stream that represents you -- AND a place where you could follow your friends and other interesting sources of content (news, brands, personalities) from multiple diverse streams of content -- images, microblog updates, articles, videos, etc.
Of course those other sources of content have gradually limited sharing outside their walled gardens, and Tumblr eventually developed its own distinct culture and identity from others in the space and fostered more native content of its own that sustained it all these years later.
The initial seed, though, its first growth trajectory, was powered by piping in as much content from other sources so there's something to look at when you get here.
I think we should be thinking about reducing friction around getting content from other sources into the Fedi where people can read and respond to it. Make it dead simple for people to pipe in their own content (blog posts, photo feeds, microblog updates) as well as actively invest in content re-post bots from major (and minor) news sources that people and communities can subscribe to and engage around. Communities can choose how they curate those feeds, but ignoring them risks stagnation of the reading experience.