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It is actually going well, I realize that simply posting every day is not valuable and creating posts that create engagement is more important than spamming links. I found that the hexbear tactic is the right one, posting threads asking for engagement then having users post follow ups works the most and creates the best experience. Simply having Eeddit clone communities with a bunch of links and no engagement will never meaningfully grow a community, especially when the one doing it stops posting. Lemmy will never grow following the tactics of venture capital and existent social media, we have to develop actual communities of friends. Unfortunately that means sometimes people you think are your friends betray you on a simple disagreement.
My biggest problem is with Lemmy users themselves and their internal politics and drama machines. All drama communities that post pictures of other users to call attention to them are toxic and prevent engagement. If Lemmy wants to grow they need to stop acting like Reddit.
This is real feedback from my users:
"I don't want to make posts online knowing that people outside the community will deliberately read them in bad faith to try create a drama post that causes outside users to make antagonistic comments."
a different user went on to add:
"Recently there was a survey on pronouns and gender identity on hb, and then an anti-misogyny discussion afterwards. It ended up with a cycle of s.j.w and .world users screenshotting comments on hb, creating drama posts, then hb users screenshotting those posts back to hb, etc etc etc. All instances should ban posting content from defederated communities imo, or what is the point of defederation."
This is really problematic for me that people don't want to post because if they say the wrong thing or if it is taken the wrong way we get harassed. I know Lemmy has decided to attack all "tankies" which basically has no definition other than "person I don't like and must harass" now people are too scared to post lest they be on the receiving end of harassment. This is going to really stifle the meaningful growth. As someone who has now been posted about multiple times in these communities it feels really bad and is generally for no purpose. To grow lemmy and to boost engagement and to boost comment engagement this must be addressed. Until it is addressed and large instance owners allow these harassment communities to continue to fester we will never grow into a true large scale social media platform.
The other major problem I'm having are people with large amounts of federated accounts that then wield them to manipulate the votes. Sometimes it is really obvious and I can address but other times it isn't and will only take a computer developer with moderate skills to design some kind of harassment bot to aid in this agenda. Turning off downvotes helps, but even boosting the wrong thing stifles engagement and enjoyment and really needs a long term solution, I'm hoping that some kind of fediverse idP will be established so that we can separate the identities out from the communities and have some basic level of protection against this level of astro turfing.
Agreed, regarding the need for engagement and comments and not just posts. I run several communities and conversation/engagement seems to be the route to eventually making the communities semi-independent (of me posting with careful regulatory).
This is with regards to your second quote. It's worth considering that for many people hexbear and lemmigrad are rather disgusting places. People living in the west who are supporting genocidal Russian imperialism or the CCP? Why would one want to deal with this?
I also disagree that supporters of Russian genocidal imperialism and western-based CCP fans have any kind of positive impact on Lemmy's growth trajectory. If anything they hinder Lemmy's growth.
It ended up with a cycle of s.j.w and .world users screenshotting comments on hb, creating drama posts
Any examples to these posts ?
I don't care enough to go through the ridiculous "meanwhileongrad" and "hexbear" nonsense to do this legwork, I trust the experiences people have and believe them. sjw has an obsessive user goat and hexbear has way to much stuff I am about 45 years too old to even understand to find the example.
All of it is targeting and harassment driving. People notice and don't post because of this. I have people telling me this directly and have no reason to think they are lying. I think both hexbear and sjw should stop this behavior and am not preferring one over the other.
In the same vein as this one of the worst experiences I had on Reddit was random communities that I had never interacted with dm’ing me I was banned after posting to a completely different community.
Imagine if instead the coward that set up that bot would dm you directly “I’ll never interact with you because you posted to X”. How unhinged that would sound.
Being a mod in a community should never be allowed to be used for bullying strangers. Specially ones that have never interacted with your community in the first place.