So one thing I miss about reddit is the idea that I can just find any random topic, and there’s an active sub for that.
Reddits biggest problem is knowing these subreddits exist. I was there over 10 years, and still finding new subs until the end.
Lemmys biggest problem is that these communities DON’T exist, and even if they did, theres no audience to support them. No point in making a niche community if theres 0 posts, and 1 subscribber.
But, I found one small fix. This won’t be the thing that boosts Lemmy to the top. This will be more like the small spark that could lead to a bigger fire. Without more steps, this won’t be the answer. But think of this as one step of many.
So over at !Nostalgia@lemmy.ca they have a content bot. I assume it’s just reposting the posts on reddit from a predesignated source.
But, what if we did that all over Lemmy? Start up /c/Archer and repost everything from ArcherFX. I don’t see a place to post Archer stuff to.
Now do this for thousands of different subreddits over here.
Yes, at first the content bot would have 0 posts. But thats where WE come in. We all start posting on these threads, to give them the sense of activity. Activity breeds activity. And soon enough you’ll have enough organic activity that you slowly start reducing these bots roles. But thats years from now.
We saw lots of this during the big Reddit migration a year ago. Personally I’m not a fan at all - I feel like it just floods mostly empty communities with posts that get barely any interaction. Any posts made by actual people get lost in the flood.
If I open a community and I see a handful of posts from people over the past few weeks, I might check them out, comment, maybe subscribe and contribute something. If I see a page of posts from a bot, mostly with no comments, I lose interest. And that was definitely something I ran into while first exploring Lemmy a year ago.
I’m not 100% against all bots - for example, something making daily posts might not be so bad.
This.
The bots can be helpful to grow an existing community with more content, but if they drown out legit users then you end up just hurting interaction.
Yes. I think to populate a community something reposting the top reddit post of the day, or maybe even just the week could be good. However more than that is too much.
I agree completely. I actually set it so I don’t see posts from bots. Before that I was manually blocking them.
Im actually going to try enabling them again though, so I can check out the fediverser project. Maybe things will be different this time.