cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/2173435
Reinvestment
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
The Lemmy devs honestly probably need a significant change in priorities or even a fork. They also seem to be ignoring relatively simple performance fixes that would have huge effects on the cost of instance hosting. If you think about it 60k users really shouldn’t cost that much to host. See @RoundSparrow’s thread about it here: https://lemmy.ml/comment/2971578
Yet another reason why I prefer Kbin.
The developers of Lemmy have been questionable for some time. See their post announcing Lemmy: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/
https://web.archive.org/web/20230626055233/https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/
The instance that post mentions at the end became Lemmygrad. Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are the same people. This was their first post announcing Lemmy as a real thing you could go use. (It’s also why a good chunk of the Threadiverse is absolutely infested with tankies.)
I never agitated for a fork because generally the Lemmy devs do an okay job at keeping their politics separate from their software. But the more I look at their attitudes and (frankly) the hazing they do towards contributors, the more I’m thinking that it may be better to push for an outright fork of Lemmy, give it a better name, a saner dev team, and excise the original devs entirely. Even if we ignore their politics (which is hard to do, but can be done), they’ve simply not been the best stewards of the project - it’s succeeded in spite of them, not because of them.
That said, I think Lemmy as a piece of software is generally okay. Kbin has more long-term promise, I feel, but Kbin has its own issues and is much rougher around the edges. A lot of the issues Kbin has have already been sorted out by Lemmy, so I think it might be best to make a Lemmy fork and bring in features from Kbin into it (alongside performance fixes and whatnot that the Lemmy devs refuse to action on).
They also seem obsessed about deleting/purging content and keeping Lemmy postings off of Google Search… Lemmy servers have been online for over 4 years and even on their beloved topics (Rust, communism, etc) it would almost never come up. It’s as if they think they are building private e-mail or dating service instead of public forum. Which is entirely against the idea of their self-proclaimed love of communism and copyleft stuff… why not have everyone agree to a creative commons license of their content/contributions like Wikipedia when posting on a public forum…
Honestly a Lemmy soft-fork like what glitch or hometown is to Masto would be immensely beneficial. Upstream Lemmy could be for stability and performance stuff with the occasional features, and the fork can be a lot more experimental and “fast moving” in exchange for losing some reliability and stability.
That said with the state of Lemmy’s codebase you’re gonna need some seriously motivated people collaborating together to pull that off. Masto’s glitch soc exists because one of it’s main devs is the only other dev besides Eugen that’s being paid to work full time on the project. Firefish is clearly attempting to lean in on branding for donations (drama bias: I have a single commit on Iceshrimp and the instance I’m on is looking to migrate there) and Akkoma exists because the only alternative is the freeze-peach heaven that is upstream Pleroma.
(And if the thing gets enough development work then you can consider hard-forking away from Lemmy proper and going your own way, for those who don’t like Lemmy because of the politics of the devs)