Comment on we need more users
fizzle@quokk.au 3 days ago
Here is my super unpopular take: ultimately you / some / we have misunderstood “quality over quantity”.
It doesn’t mean “we don’t want more users”, it means that the best way to attract more users and growth of the platform is to focus on being the best fediverse we can be. Actively trying to attract more users is a foot gun - even in the unlikely event you’re successful, you reduce the quality of the experience for everyone.
Focusing instead on the health, vibrance, management, and activity of the platform is the best way to attract more users.
Perhaps another way of saying the same thing: the most fertile market segment are those users who used to be active monthly. They were here trying to participate at some point but lost interest. Why? Pretty solid guess is that they were still logging in to reddit for the special / niche interest subs, and after a few months got sick of checking lemmy.
IMO, dead special interest communities are the cancer consuming the fediverse. Nothing wrong with a small active community, but a small community with a half dozen posts from 3 years ago is a big sign saying “go back to reddit, this place is dead”.
Would it almost be better to prune old communities? I agree it’s off-putting to find community for an interest and seeing last activity like a year ago, doesn’t make you want to post since it seems inactive.
One thing about how reddit/lemmy works though is people subscribed (assumedly still active on Lemmy elsewhere) might still see that content vs a forum where no activity means very few visit the site.
That might be an option. I personally would be fine with that but I’ve noticed that many / most users get very upset about the notion that posts / communities / users are impermanent ?
Another solution is to simply promote these dead communities - if anyone is interested in warming them up then they should do so. If they’re consistent then after a few months ask existing mods to add them as mods, or ask admins to do so if the mods are not responsive.
This approach runs the risk that the person doing the work may not become a mod, but honestly I don’t think being a mod should be the objective of creating a community.
Yeah, I just thought about my suggestion more and one thing I think that has given reddit so much staying power is the fact content sticks around so long, I’d imagine many of us here would specifically search in reddit for reviews or help with something and found a like 3 year old thread with the answer.
So… Pruning is probably a bad idea lol.
Unfortunately threadiverse searchability is pretty bad, assumedly because of the nature of the fediverse with content being copied across instances essentially I am sure its a little more difficult for an indexer to properly handle it, not to mention somehow deciding which instance to specifically link to for a certain thread. On top of that, it wouldn’t surprise me if all the corpo search engines would deprioritize most fediverse sites out of self preservation 🤷
On the “warming them up” that makes sense in theory, but usually if I’m making a rare post it’s to engage with a group of people, if I don’t see the engagement I’m probably not going to go there again to post whatever it is because what’s the point if no one sees it anyway?
I mean “warming up” a community intentionally.
For example, one of the subs I regularly read on reddit is /r/audiobooks, looking for recommendations et cetera. The audiobook communities here are dead.
If I want to adopt one of those dead communities here, I could just decide to make several posts a week for a few months. Thereafter, if I’m still keen, and still haven’t had any interaction from the existing mods, I could approach the admin of that instance and make my case for being appointed as a mod.
Maybe we should put a pinned post at the top of each dead community that just says “go here instead”
Pruning is a bad idea imo. Old communities here (like on reddit) can be great resources for solutions to technical problems, for example. And weird one-off communities that have like 2 memes from a decade ago can be really funny when you get linked to them.
Perhaps a notification-type nag, a tab of “communities you used to use but haven’t posted to for a while” but with a snappier title, alongside “local” and “all”.
and now PieFed supports moving posts! piefed.social/…/piefed-1-5-is-released-move-posts…
So Piefed admins/mods could consolidate communities by moving the posts before deleting the community
oh that’s a great feature
Just to give you an example, I help mod a community called !askusa@discuss.online where we wanted to open up a space to discuss topics of interest to people in the USA, yet remain a safe space away from politics.
What then is there for us to talk about, these days, that does not involve politics?!?!? (this btw was the topic of my 2nd-to-last post, six months ago now)
I do not need a nagging reminder to help me realize what is happening here… :-(
IMO, dead special interest communities are the cancer consuming the fediverse. Nothing wrong with a small active community, but a small community with a half dozen posts from 3 years ago is a big sign saying “go back to reddit, this place is dead”.
That’s the position we have at !fedigrow@lemmy.zip , still every time we suggest to close a dead community people show up and argue that consolidating communities is turning this place into Reddit.
PagPag@lemmy.world 2 days ago
This place has always been dead if special interest groups are a measure. There is nothing here and honestly never was…
fizzle@quokk.au 2 days ago
I’m not disagreeing with you. I didn’t say “this place used to be a utopia of special interest content”.