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.
[email protected] has seen some recent activity, though considering how many monthly visitors it has, I'm a bit surprised it's not more active (partially my fault, I haven't posted there in quite some time).
[email protected] has been doing quite well thanks to @[email protected], @[email protected], and @[email protected] for consistently posting excellent videos! You guys rock! 😄
I had noticed the posts popping up and it was nice to see.
One thing I find about the BIFL forums is that it ends up being a lot of the same things over and over again, because, well, they're the things that lasted, most likely because they are simple things. Perhaps you could have an item of the week, such as what over the ear headphones have lasted you the longest, what sneaker took more of a beating than you ever thought it could, etc. More things that get used everyday but maybe not BIFL god tier like a cast iron pan, but something you would like to get 5-10 years out of. Speed Queens are great, but most people only buy a washer/dryer every decade or so, so there isn't much conversation to be had in a small user base like we have here. I saw the sidebar says it doesn;t technically have to be "for life", just above average durable.
Trying to help @[email protected] with [email protected], let's see how it goes!
Trying to help @[email protected] keep [email protected] active, more challenging than expected
Haha thanks ❤️
I always try to find different sources for posting in communities I created, but when it comes to esport, it's hard to diversify because there's a lot of fake news websites that just regurgitate ai content
Definitely!
How happy are you with [email protected] @[email protected] ? 😄
I am happy with all of my communities. Seeing them grow really makes me happy.
[email protected] : Just today I make this community public for everyone.
Nice grow on !balatro recently, well done!
[email protected] is growing quite well, thank you @[email protected] for helping with this one!
The post on [email protected] got a few comments: https://sopuli.xyz/post/18211534
The mod hasn't said anything, I'm not sure they are even active on Lemmy anymore.
What do you think we should do?
This is a problem I see all over Lemmy. I'll find communities and think "Oh cool!" but then notice the last post is from a year ago. Then I'll notice they have like 24 subscribers. Then I'll notice they only have one mod who hasn't posted ANYTHING ANYWHERE in 1 year.
So I give up on that community, despite being interested in the content. With that said, I'm NOT interested in sim racing. Unless this is somehow a community about the Maxis game The Sims, from 24 years ago, and someone made a way for them to go racing. THAT would be awesome.
Then I'll notice they only have one mod who hasn't posted ANYTHING ANYWHERE in 1 year.
So I give up on that community, despite being interested in the content.
Not sure why that is a reason to give up. Most admins are happy to swap out AWOL mods for active ones. It wouldn't hurt to shoot them a message and ask.
We have mechanisms for transferring sub ownership, so once the community is made, any individual can bring it back to life with some effort. It's really just a population thing though, we're not quite big enough to support really niche interests yet.
It's also a small issue of people thinking that other people will grow their communities for them, in a sort of "if you build it, they will come" mentality. This is false 99% of the time, and only works if you're arriving at just the right time to spin up a community that there is a huge amount of demand for. Almost all communities are built off of months of regular, dedicated posting by a single individual though, which is usually the creator.
Anyways though, this'll resolve in time if the service continues to grow over the years.
That's the issue we are trying to solve here.
I remember you were interesting in model trains, correct? [email protected] could be interesting to you
I honestly don't know. The whole instance politics discussion is too complicated to comprehend.
Based on the 200 comments on that thread (https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/23836769) there seems to be quite a few people who block or do not participate on lemmy.ml communities
Moving the community elsewhere seems like an opportunity.
Hopefully that's more clear.
same
