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:

#bookstodon to literature.cafe
#monsterdon to lemmy.film
#climateemergency to slrpnk.net
#histodon to some equivalent of ask historians (This is probably the only way we’d get the experts needed)
Any of the many art tags to lemmyloves.art

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[–] deweydecibel@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] spaduf@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.