One of the hurdles to change for users switching from reddit to a federated platform is less content. The logic goes: “smaller community, less content, I can see i’m missing out on stuff over there so I’m not going to switch away”.
One potential solution to this would be automated cross-posting, using bots or similar. Obviously there are cons to this approach, which we are all likely aware of.
What are your thoughts on focusing efforts in this direction to drive faster user growth? Good because it will drive more users to consider jumping ship given that it reduces FOMO? Bad because it makes the place look less community spirited and genuine and different?
The content porting really only means something when it’s not overwhelming and the person doing the content porting is actively planning to participate in the submissions.
The easiest way to get someone to not comment on something is a wall of submissions with a fair number of upvotes and few to no comments. At this point, it’s just a glorious RSS feed rather than an actual community.
Driving user growth actually requires putting in the leg work to make meaningful submissions, following-up on them, commenting on submissions, and upvoting content. All of this takes actual effort though. A bot content porting content from Reddit to Lemmy doesn’t do much and for a number of people, looks much more like artificial engagement rather than any meaningfully sincere attempt at growing a community.
Some of the (World/US) News and Politics related communities are so barren of comments despite the deluge of content porting submissions, while other communities have blown up into their own distinct thing because people are making sincere, organic (enough) submissions.
Very insightful points. I totally agree about the intimidation factor of spamming posts with no comments or organic interaction. But it’s also a fine line, someone needs to be posting something to get the ball rolling.
I also want to continue spreading the word about federation issues. I’ve been on Lemmy for a month now and it’s going great. But that whole time, it’s essentially been impossible to comment on kbin magazines. The comments simply don’t show up. I’m not seeing most of your comments when browsing here from Lemmy, but I am seeing Lemmy comments.
I obviously have this account, but its annoying to keep switching between accounts, plus I haven’t really gotten the hang of the kbin interface yet.
Point being, I suspect much of the sluggishness of organic growth is not due to a small userbase, but rather due to the fact nobody can actually find the threads and comment on them efficiently. We need to remain steadfast and trust that the developers will fix this stuff up soon. I really feel that simply making Lemmy and kbin federate perfectly would immediately make this platform 10 times more active. We have plenty of people but right now we are fragmented into parallel communities. This isn’t even getting into the server overload at a number of Lemmy instances.
I just don’t want people to write off the platform before we can see how it’s actually meant to work. I’ve seen a ton of brilliant comments on kbin and I haven’t even had the chance to really mix it up with you guys yet.