this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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Fedigrow
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To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
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Think about the experience new users have.
I bring this up a lot, but among the things putting people off from sticking to Lemmy, the new user experience is just not great. I'm not talking about choosing an instance, I'm talking about the general attitude Lemmy has towards content in the feed.
I know it's a very popular idea that if you don't like communities or instances or users, you can block them. Unfortunately, most social media users aren't interested in spending a couple of hours curating their feed to make it useful for them. People are coming in to a feed full of a growing number of niche porn communities, and if they can sort through that, they find heavy-handed political messages, FOSS bros telling everyone how popular software sucks, repost bots with zero discussion, and small community moderators desperately posting dozens of links into the void, hoping for bites.
At the very least, Lemmy needs a sort algorithm that is capable of keeping a page of the feed from being dominated by one community. Going further, I think we could benefit from giving instance admins the tools to curate a default feed that appeals to a wider audience of users.
Maybe then the smaller communities would have a shot at growing.
Very valid point here. I've forgotten what an unfiltered Lemmy would look like at this point. Even with a filtered list, I just scrolled through my usual All, Top 6 Hours and didn't find a thing I wanted to read as it was all depressing news for the first 3 pages.
The critique about one community dominating is a good one also. I block just about all the meme comms, but I leave the Science Memes one unblocked because there are a few I enjoy, but there are days where it's just my whole front page and it's like, give someone else a chance guys!
Didn't Reddit have a "welcome pack" of pre-subscribbed subs like Blaze mentions in their reply? It might be nice if the main site or some of the app developers would have welcome packs so when you installed you could select a "Tech," "Humor," "Science and Nature," etc starter pack of subscribed comms to get you into it, and then you can adjust as you see fit. I'm thinking when we came on board, there wasn't as much we had to block at first so we could do it a bit at a time.
I'm not sure how NSFW is handled now. I have most of it blocked because if that's what you want, I'm not sure why you'd come here to it when the rest of the internet is right there, but I agree again with your point. I'm pretty open minded, but there is a lot available here that while I don't feel it shouldn't exist, I don't feel the need to be exposed to that much of fringe fetishes that aren't my thing! π
If NSFW started off hidden and you could either click an "I'm All In" setting to unleash it all, or just have access to a comm list and you can uncheck what you see fit, that might be more useful to most people than the all or nothing we have now.
Also, while I'm talking about it, I'd be welcome to some more granularity is the NSFW, like the perennial NSFW vs NSFL (life) where we split up things like porn and gore, or even medical gore vs violent imagery, etc. I'd be interested in some of the medical stuff, and even in Superbowl, there's medical things I'd be up to share and educate about that the general subscriber base isn't going to want to see there, but is animal rescue/rehab related. If that was something people could leave on or turn off, the same community could serve 2 overlapping audiences without making a seperate group.
Totally agree. Differentiating NSFW and NSFL is a must have. Right now I have NSFW turned on bc I occasionally want to see Ukraine combat stuff, but I've probably had to spend like 2+ hours blocking all the niche porn communities which is becoming untenable as every day a few more spin up. And I love the idea of a welcome/starter pack for new users; that's the other part of Lemmy that's really lacking - finding the communities you want to be a part of (if they even exist on the fediverse yet)! So many communities are ghost towns, other topic-based communities have duplicates or triplicate communities on different instances, etc. my strategy is to subscribe to communities as I find them in my feed, but having an index of the most popular communities curated for new users would be a game changer.
I created a list in a comment below, feel free to suggest any community you think should be there too
You have a good point.
Most of the people here despise sorting algorithms, and are fine with doing their own filtering, but to appeal to a wider audience, there should indeed be a way to suggest new joiners that they subscribe to a set of general communities that can be appealing to almost anyone. Of course experienced users can disable that, but that would definitely help.
By coincidence, I had to come up with a list of "active communities that are not memes, tech, news or politics", and here it is. It might be a starting point
Discussion:
Pictures:
Learning:
Entertainment:
Manual Hobbies
Art
Animals
I'll upvote you as per my support for you in another reply...
But I notice an animal community egregiously missing from your list... π
Edit: Just checked the rankings. How am I below bats, racoons, and possums??? I don't get these users sometimes! (kidding) But seriously, how are all of these above Dogs? I'd expect them to be up there with cats just do to, you know, they live in peoples' houses with them.
Yes, I'm not a pet person but I was surprised too. Maybe dogs just have less active posters?
I just looked at the stats quick and it's somewhat insightful.
Dogs has the most subs (3.4k), but only gets a post every 2-3 days, so not as many daily users (42).
Opossums has about half the subs (1.9k) , posts once or twice a day, and has over 500 daily users, which I don't know if I've ever gotten...great for them!
Bats and Raccoons fall in the middle of those numbers.
I'm killing it in total comments though and have more subs than all but Cats, which has an outstanding almost 18k. Out of 50k users, that is pretty dang impressive. I'd like to think at least a quarter of my subs are due to the work I put in, but I assume most of them came looking for a clone Reddit group.
Does any of it mean anything? Probably not. I'm glad to see them have a chance to shine. I like all the animals anyway. I enjoyed my ride on the first page of communities during Owl of the Year and picked up a lot of new subs during that, and I hope they make the most of it too. I don't know how hard it is to find new and unique pics of some of those animals day in and day out though. Again though, I feel that would make Dogs higher up as many people can just glance down and see a dog! I guess Lemmy folk are just cat people.
Edited π
Sopuli kind of achieves this, by defederating the instances that are for the kind of content I would want a separate account for anyway.
Lemmy could really use a feature where instance admins can "shadow defedarate" instances and communities. They would not actually become inaccessible, but instead simply not appear in all, instead only appearing for users who have found the community some other way, and subscribed.