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:

  • rglullis@communick.news
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    1 year ago

    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?”

          • Blaze
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            1 year ago

            I would expect it to be the top leagues of each region and the local “Champions League”. Maybe the 20 top clubs.

            Shouldn’t be that much

            • CombatWombatEsq@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I was just sharing my experience with running the communities for the three clubs in my city. I look forward to hearing about your experience with running all those – I’m sure you’ll do much better than I and much more efficiently.

              • Blaze
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                1 year ago

                Oh, sorry, I misunderstood you.

                You can probably once post once a day per club, that way you keep them active but it doesn’t take too much time.

    • Mars2k21@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.