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Lemmy/Kbin Reinvestment Phase and Recruiting from Mastodon

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/2173435

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:

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  • It would help a ton if mastodon - lemmy federation was smoother. For example if people could follow communities on mastodon without seeing every comment as a post would help a lot.

    • Kbin's federation with Mastodon works as you'd expect it to work.

      I don't know why Lemmy insists on such bad integration with Mastodon. Last I checked, the Lemmy devs were insisting on not having smooth integration with Mastodon.

      Doesnt make much sense when you can create a second account on Mastodon or one of many other platforms which already implement user following much better.

      It's one reason why I jumped to Kbin and have been using it for the past few months. Kbin does indeed support user following much better -and it supports threads showing up in Mastodon much better too.

      • The Lemmy devs honestly probably need a significant change in priorities or even a fork. They also seem to be ignoring relatively simple performance fixes that would have huge effects on the cost of instance hosting. If you think about it 60k users really shouldn't cost that much to host. See @RoundSparrow's thread about it here: https://lemmy.ml/comment/2971578

    • What's the alternative? It honestly seems like a worthwhile way to do it for me. I really think there's only value in following niche communities from Mastodon. Discourse like that found on politics and news is pretty plentiful (and often higher quality) on Mastodon as is, but the gardening communities make up an important part of my Mastodon feed.

      • If you follow a Kbin community on Mastodon, the top-level post is the only thing shared to the community's "profile". If you click on the post, then the comments section is the Kbin comments section.

        Here's an example of a Kbin post I made displaying on Mastodon. I replied to this post, and my reply shows up as a reply to the top-level post.

      • It'd be a lot nicer if only posts were boosted by the community "account". Threaded replies are already supported on Mastodon, so there's not really a good reason for the community account to boost those as well.

    • Yeah having the ability to properly interact with book/writing communities from this instance would be nice. As well as being able to interact well with mastodon.art from lemmyloves.art and vice versa.

  • Regardless of where the loss in users is coming from the major takeaway here is that we are firmly in a reinvestment phase.

    Regardless? No, I'd say figuring out the reason is pretty important before any plans are moved on.

    Luckily, there's more than enough talk about Lemmy both here and on Reddit that you can read to give you an understanding of why exactly Lemmy isn't growing. And I don't believe appealing to Mastodon users is addressing the most pertinent of them: from the perspective of reddit users that aren't already here, this place is a confusing mess filled with bickering instances, empty communities, and no content, all of which is much more complicated to access than the idea of lemmy that was initially sold to them.

    They don't want to think about instances or federation or admin squabbles. They just want a social network like reddit. Whether or not they want centralization, they at least want the outward appearance and usability of one. If you're telling them they have to set up more than 1 account on different instances, you've already lost them.

    I don't know how, maybe a front end or an app or something, but somehow this all has to be simplified and unified dramatically to get most of their attention. There especially needs to be a way for users to see everything they want to see in one place, regardless of which instance they're on and the mentality of its admins.

    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.

    Are you going to host them? You can maybe get people to volunteer as mods but this notion of "every topic is its own instance" is entirely dependant on there being one person for each individual community being willing to host an instance and maintain it themselves, in perpetuity.

    But the vast majority of people have neither the knowledge, time, resources, or desire to do this. And even if they did, there's no guarantee that person has the mentality to admin an instance. The last thing we need is finding the one person that's willing to host an instance for some niche interest turning out to be a complete asshole and ruining the place.

    Think about how many reddit head mods just fucked off for months at a time. What happens when an instance admin does that?

    But more importantly, what are you going to draw them here with? Why would they bother? What's the sales pitch? What do they gain?

    • They just want a social network like reddit

      Reddit users by and large are not content creators, particularly not in the way that Mastodon users are. I'm suggesting each Mastodon user recruited would be worth way more than each reddit user recruited. Reddit users are simply not worth the effort and have significantly less to add to the culture/conversation

      empty communities, and no content

      This is the most important part. But bootstrapping communities is a tough problem. I'm suggesting it's significantly easier to advertise on Mastodon than it is on Reddit. At this point it's hard to imagine advertising on Reddit being met with any sort of positive response at all.

      Are you going to host them?

      They're already there. They are currently struggling with growth. This seems to primarily be an issue of getting the word out.

      But more importantly, what are you going to draw them here with? Why would they bother? What’s the sales pitch? What do they gain?

      They gain group-like functionality and deeper, more focused discussion. These are often requested features of Mastodon that Lemmy can provide without any additional features on the development side.

  • Passing the knowledge to Mastodon users that they can post to the threadiverse from Mas might be a good, soft, recruiting approach.

    For example if someone is posting about something local to them, they know to include the hashtag of their city to get visibility. If they also mentioned a lemmy community dedicated to the city, they'd increase their reach considerable. Then once they know their city has a lemmy community maybe they'll come check it out... and get hooked.

    For those that don't know, you can post a new thread from Mastodon by mentioning the community in the @ channel @ server format. The first line of your post becomes the title and the remainder becomes the body.

  • Sports and sports news. That's where we need to recruit.

    /r/nba has 8 million subscribers. /r/soccer has 5 million.

    We can have sport-focused instances, and we can have one community for each team from the major leagues. We can have "legal gray area" instances focused on video and streams for games that are not on TV or online.

    Dontt get me wrong, I think the topics and instances you mentioned can be definitely interesting, but they all seem to be a bit of "preaching to the converted". We need to go after the people who look at Lemmy and think "there is nothing there that I don't get on Reddit, why should I bother to learn all that fediverse crap?"

    • https://fanaticus.social/ seems like the perfect place

    • I'm for this idea. Large sports communities could bring multiple new instances and also just a flood of active users in other communities. If we were to pick a specific community to come join, these guys and people in tech communities should be the first choices.

      Communities centered around sports teams like r/chelseafc or r/lakers could warrant an entire Lemmy or Kbin instance with separate communities about that particular team (trade/signing rumors, live games, social media posts, etc). For them, federation actually has some huge benefits.

      Plus as a side note, I'd love to have the regular diehard sports bickering on the Fediverse. Seriously. They'll be quite the counter to the current culture of the Fediverse, however. Arguing about Mbappé's longevity or whether the current NBA champions will win again would drown out the politics anyway, which is a massive plus in my book.

  • A Federation of lemmy instances need to do for Communities what a network of IRC servers do for channels.

    • What does that mean for those of us who never got into IRC?

      • the simplest explanation would be that a network of irc server are working together to provide the same channel for its users to interact with.

        so imagine if you had a cluster of lemmy servers, each of them are helping to keep conversation going in an identical community. !example@lemmy.one !example@lemmy.two !example@lemmy.three

        if lemmy.one and lemmy.three go down for maintenance or whatever, lemmy.two is still serving the community. once lemmy.one comes online, it syncs up with lemmy.two and both serve the same community until lemmy.three comes back and syncs up too.

        in this way, you don't have three separate example communities on different servers, but one community that multiple servers are sharing.

        i hope this helps explain my thoughts.

  • 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_mastodon

  • Makes mood plenty of sense to me! Especially all the stuff about mastodon.

    Also, if you didn’t know, a shirt sort that takes account of the relative size of communities is in the works. I’ve seen pull requests for it. So it might not be far off.

    EDIT: dumb mobile typos / bad autocorrect

  • A Federation of lemmy instances need to do for Communities what a network of IRC servers do for channels.

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