Fedigrow

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13 users here now

To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks

founded 8 months ago
MODERATORS
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Also, if you have doubts about brigading, Discuit have a brigading post on their meta community: https://discuit.net/DiscuitMeta/post/pTyw2MZw

Edit: as you can see, the post has been deleted

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Let me know if this is appropriate for this community.

I've been collecting links to post, blog, article, comment, etc that criticize the fediverse, whether it's about the specific apps or fediverse in general, whether it's about the technical aspect or about the social aspect.

If you also found one, feel free to share it here.

(date format is YYYY-MM-DD)

2024

2023

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I noticed today an occurence of a user complaining about Lemmy being worse then Reddit. The modlogs shows how toxic they are. When this was pointed out, the user deletes their account

https://web.archive.org/web/20241217101003/https://sopuli.xyz/post/20276017?scrollToComments=true

Deleted account: https://kbin.melroy.org/u/Pyrin

This seems to address the question that comes up once in a while "a public modlog is only useful for mods" (https://feddit.org/post/4920887/3235141), while we can see from this example that it can also be useful for toxic users.

As you may know, [email protected] is a community dedicated to calling out power tripping mods.

Should we consider having a similar community for toxic users?

There is already [email protected], but I feel like the "lore" is more about large-scale events (like the cats wave recently) than specific users events.

Edit: Updated the title, and put the emphasis on creating a community to call out toxic users rather than "dunking" on the users that was banned.

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[email protected], [email protected]

That's probably the good news of the day for me.

I had a bit heated exchange with Serinus, one of the LW mods yesterday: https://feddit.org/post/5619797/3605420

In the end they agreed to lock [email protected]

Hopefully this will help with the activity of the community!

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I've recently started trying to revitalize a niche community ([email protected]) that had been silent for a year or so, simply by posting more content. I have been made a moderator by the instance owners (so I could do any cleaning/maintenance if that was needed).

I have been posting for almost a month and got my very first new post, by another user than me I mean, in the last 24h. That was so effing cool! And it also was real good content for our niche.

That said, I still want to post more stuff.

And I would like to also renew the old banner and icon which I think is meh. I even made a mock-up I wanted to put online and then see if members liked it. That's when I started worrying it might be a very stupid idea.

I don't want members to feel like I'm taking hold of anything. My sole objective is to encourage more people to post more, and to help make the community as welcoming and alive as I can. But by doing too much I'm afraid I would only make members feel I'm making it 'mine'.

Instead of doing that, I considered asking all members their opinion about renewing the banner, and invite them to submit their own propositions. But, here again, I'm worrying:

  1. They could feel bombarded by my too many posts and/or intimidated by my invitation to participate.
  2. And then, if we were to organize some friendly competition, how would I (and why me?) pick the winning proposition? By a vote? Sure, but then I'm afraid people would encourage their friends to vote for them which would not be fair to people with fewer friends.

So, here I am. A bit naive and afraid I could do more arm than good.

What do you think? Do I worry too much?

Do you have any practical suggestion? Should I post less? Should I give up on that banner idea? (I really think a new and less serious banner could help but it's also not an obsession, so...)

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I wanted to pick a name that's generic and not specific to any particular platform. For example, [email protected] instead of [email protected]

I don't see a community for that yet, aside from [email protected], which is specific to Loops.

Some sources of the content could be:

  • Fediverse Loops
  • Tiktok
  • Instagram Reels
  • YouTube Shorts

The sidebar could include guides on how to link to the content in a more accessible way (ex. alternate front-ends or re-posting).

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This is in regards to the brand-new [email protected] community.

And by more serious discussions I mean e.g. the legality of the recent jury nullification issue, which I don't want to allow if I were a moderator in it.

If you say yes you will be granted the community "ownership" as the sole moderator. I've only been a mod myself on Lemmy for less than a day but we'll figure out how to transfer it to you. You can ofc always add new mods and change it however you like after that. The advantage here is chiefly that you get the community "name" AskUSA, whereupon I could later create e.g. a CasualUSA but you would have the privileges of that specific name, to match the style of e.g. AskUK or AskLemmy (or AskScience or AskMen or AskElectronics or AskAndroid etc. - there are so many here using that style:-).

I don't want to be involved in something that is going to constantly be depressing to me, though I do recognize the need for such and am offering the community "name" if someone else wants to pick up that mantle.

While if nobody says yes then I suppose I'll just keep it going in the more CasualUSA light-hearted style, until such time as someone does. Either way I'll offer to help grow it by posting and commenting to it regularly - unless you want me to stop b/c I tend to be really bad at guessing what people want to see (e.g. personally I love John Oliver and also got involved in the Reddit protests, so why people are downvoting sexy pics of JO on Lemmy of all places... I seriously have no clue).

The community also needs moderators to help in general - so even if you don't want to take it over, would you like to help moderate it if it were to remain a more casual, light-hearted community?

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If you want your community to grow, there's things you can do to help. Some of them are better than others. What are things that are good for the Fediverse, and what are some things that are better left on other platforms? Here's a few things and my opinions

  • Clickbaity titles ("Liberals DESTROYED by LOGIC") - No thank you.

  • Consistent posting - Yes. If you start a community, you'll probably be the only one posting on there for a while. It's easier to bootstrap a community if it's something that comes with content ready-to-go somehow to make your job easier.

  • GIFs - I've been using this over in [email protected]. That's about as growth-hacky as I'd like to get, but I'm pretty sure people are more likely to engage with animated GIFs than static images for communities like that.

  • Sources - I think this is something that can differentiate the Fediverse from other platforms. On my posts in [email protected], I've been spending time to source everything before posting it. This makes sure I don't accidentally post edited images that I've seen over in /r/outofcontextcomics, and makes the Fediverse show up in searches. That actually probably hurts growth a little bit, but IMO is worth it

  • Transcribing - Another differentiator for the Fediverse. Everything's been done by hand and it's been great. I've been transcribing my posts in [email protected] and I've been very happy to see that search engines are already picking those up.

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I like the concept of fedigrow and [email protected] and similar communities to get more attention to new and small communities, but I was missing a way to promote german speaking communities.

That's why I started [email protected] yesterday. A place for the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) to share and request communities that communicate primarily in german.

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I tried multiple times to win over H.P.-communities to join Lemmy, until now with no success. Usually they either dont reply, threaten to ban me (Reddit) or say they dont have the time.

The latter happened to me just recently. They heard about the Fediverse, think its cool, but are already overwhelmed with keeping the site up.

What do you think here? Are you having similar experiences? Are you even doing it? Whould it be a good idea to propose a minimal solution like RSS-integration rather than full AP-support?

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SOLUTION: literally write out [exclamation mark]community@instance. Do not use the autocomplete function. This works in both the sidebar and comments.

Using the URL markdown method (to have the display text be different from the dynamic link) impacts other UIs.

If you enter this:

You get this:

The links in the screenshot above will work in a graceful manner irrespective of what instance (or even what UI/platform?) you use.


Original Text

What are the best practises for adding links to other communities in your sidebar?

I mod the LW hardware community and all the links are tied to LW.

So https://programming.dev/c/linuxhardware

is linked via https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]

But that would mean anyone not on LW would get a logged out view of LW accessing the programming.dev/linuxhardware community. I don't have a programming.dev account so I added an LW-specific URL.

Is there some sort of markdown code that would "auto redirect" the user to a view based on their instance without any use of explicit URLs. For a second I thought that's what the exclamation mark does, but turns out it's just a shortcut for adding community URLs.

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Why consolidate communities?

One of the advantages of a decentralized platform like Lemmy is the ability to create parallel communities on the same topic. "You don't like how a community is being moderated? Go to another instance and start a new community!" (with or without blackjack and hookers)

However, this is also a double-edged sword. The creation of multiple communities on the same (or similar) topics can also fragment the userbase, leading to very sparsely populated communities.

A few perspectives in favour of consolidation: (credits to @[email protected], @[email protected], and @[email protected])

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/11171955

I think until there’s some tool or system that helps collate all the information out here, fragmentation is detrimental to growth.

I’m not going to copy and paste the same comment with every mirrored post.

So sometimes commenting feels like a waste of time.

Centralizing helps ensure that there’s vibrant, consistent discussion which is what Lemmy should be about.

https://lemmy.ca/comment/8823953

I like this because people showing up to those communities might think that topic doesn’t have activity on Lemmy, when it actually does.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/8370860

I sometimes think that unmoderated communities should be closed, and just be left and locked with a pointer to the active one. In case an issue arises with the active one, they can still be unlocked and used as back up.

Consolidating electric vehicle communities

Applying these principles to the EV communities on Lemmy, let's take an overview of what currently exists:

General-purpose:

Location-specific:

Other:

Do all of these communities serve a distinct purpose? If not, could we consolidate some of them?

While Lemmy does not currently have a built-in way of moving or merging communities, @[email protected] has had some success with pinning an explanation post directing users to the new community and locking the old one. Is this something which could be applied to the EV communities on Lemmy?

The next question is, of course "Which communities should we consolidate to?"

Given the general sentiment to move off of ML (for ideological reasons) and off of World (to avoid centralization of instances), my proposal would be [email protected]. I think the SolarPunk instance is a nice match for an EV community, but I am interested to hear what others think.

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Seems like there is an appetite from a few people from aussie.zone so that you guys can be kept up-to-date.

Pinging a few other people that are usually interested in this kind of stuff.

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I've seen the idea of organically growing communities indirectly and directly mentioned in various threads when people discuss which communities they'd like to see on instances, and in a different way in response to community creation announcements. Despite this, and some inconsistent efforts on my own part, I've not seen too many others appear to be trying to put this in action.

I think any of the open-ended chat/conversation/general communities are a good place to start with this, but I've found it tricky to work out what to post to them. I suspect that may be somewhat similar for others, but being in the boat with'em, I'm not sure how to help.

Regardless, I think these communities make more sense for people to find those that share their interests to then start their own communities vs. starting communities before knowing if anyone else is interested.

What do you think, and what do you think would help people feel comfortable posting in these broader communities?

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Realized it's been a while

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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
 

Just wondering if anyone has ideas around best practices for cross posting articles?

I recently setup [email protected] and mainly only post to that community, with no cross posting.

My thinking was that it's probably best for subscribers/readers to crosspost to other communities, rather than me "spamming" the articles to other communities.

But I'm not sure it's the best way to go, since it's kind of hard to get traction with a new community initially.

Any thoughts on what is a good practice way to go about increasing visibility of the community a bit more, without annoying people? Or is it maybe best to stick to the current approach and let things happen organically?

Edit: I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to provide feedback on this post. I got a lot of useful info, and will incorporate your suggestions in future.

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