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.
I like the idea of choosing to focus deeply on enriching the content in certain communities. I think a huge tool in that fight is carefully using an “RSS to Lemmy” bot to pipe good quality feeds of relevant content into communities for further discussion around. If there’s an authoritative blog site that reliably writes good content that’d be relevant to a subLemmy audience, it might be a welcome addition.
The problem with relying on bots for that is that if they post too much content they end overwhelming the members and bringing “organic” output down. Any bot would have to be set up so that it never gets to post more than any “real” member.
Yes, I avoid communities that are just bots reposting stuff. There’s hardly ever any real human engagement and it feels empty. It’s very off-putting.
Then we have a real chicken/egg problem - not enough content to discuss and nobody discussing it.
Take a specific c/ like /us_news as an example. The feed is largely made up of timely posts from specific US news sites that are presumably acceptable to members. They can read a digest of the day’s news and react.
Then take a niche example like c/roguelites. There’s maybe one blog about roguelite games I know of where every post is worth reading, rogueliker.com. In Reddit that blog has its own sub but reposts almost every post into r/roguelites. No one minds because (a) the content is good and (b) there’s enough other organic activity in that sub that it doesn’t feel like it’s all just that blog. We have less organic activity overall here, but I’m trying to think of ways to spur engagement so communities have something going on in them.
In my opinion it’s best to walk up the tree of niche subject until you get to place that’s actually populated. If roguelights are atruggling check/post in strategy or rpg game communities, if those are also empty go up a tier to a more general gaming one. The only reason niche communities are created (outside of like, friend groups or whatever) is because the more general one is becoming over populated. Starting with the small community stuff always felt very backwards to me.
I mean… The other reason to start in a niche is because one is interested in a narrow subset of the wider topic and wants to avoid the bigger, louder, more mainstream content that dominates the conversation. I get that going up to c/games might have more content but if it’s all about Call of Duty and Madden Football, it’s not for me.
I think OP’s idea of boosting human contributions to certain communities could be one of many answers to this problem.
I wish there were more women, people of color, and older people in the fediverse. I want to talk about popculture and punk and food and local news. So I post about those things to make space for other people interested in those topics if they stop by and check it out.
Now that I have my feed curated, I like this place more. But when people first check out the fediverse, places like lemmyshitposting are up front and center and it’s incredibly offputting to see the sexism and pedophilia that’s embraced there as a first impression.
Couldn’t a sub moderator regulate that in real time though? Ideally they shouldn’t have to do too much of that, but in my experience many RSS feeds have a consistent volume of posts per day. I’m talking about choosing 1-2 feeds that post under 10 posts per day total, and an attentive mod could kibosh up to 3-4 if they’re not relevant to what the community wants. Could even put keyword filters on the feeds so relevant posts never hit the sub in the first place.
That’s essentially what I was doing with the “Community Ambassador” feature on fediverser. They could define all types of RSS feeds as sources of content, and there is a button that lets them select and easily create posts on the Lemmy communities.