Arguments to support the idea:

  • According to browse.feddit.de, this is the largest community for showcasing electronics projects, the last post is almost one month old.
  • People that signup to alien.top via the fediverserver portal will have this community as the recommended alternative to /r/electronics, but they will pretty much never see it if the community does not have any fresh content and will be more likely to lose interest.
  • Despite the usual criticism of mirroring bots, the way that the fediverser tool works is showing to actually help interaction. In the past two weeks, I’m seeing an above average increase of subscriber and (more importantly) user count on communities like !main@selfhosted.forum, !homelab@selfhosted.forum and !emacs@communick.news
  • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    An online community is not a set of users, it’s a combination of culture and momentum.

    Agree, 100%.

    The thing is, you can’t force it.

    Agree, 100%.

    The solution I’m proposing is to post real actual content. Subscribe to some rss feeds. Any single post like this has 100 times the value of something re-posted from reddit.

    That’s where we disagree. Not because I don’t think there is value in what you are saying. There absolute is value and it is very important that we have real people doing. But I don’t think this is enough.

    The problem is that we can not do that for all of the interests that we have. Do you know the rule of “1/9/90” of social media? I had about 40 subreddits I was subscribed to, and I would post to 1 or 2 (rarely), comment on about 5 (more frequently) and just lurk around the rest. /r/electronics is in the latter category.

    I mean, go look at my profile history. I think I posted more than 300 posts with content from many different communities. My past time this summer was to find different content to post in the different communities I was subscribed to or even that I created myself. I would sometimes even go out of my way to make a post about something where I knew I wouldn’t get the answer, but I thought it would be better to write it down as a way to show some signs of life. And you still think that I should “go read some books so I can ask questions”?

    No, I’m sorry. That is just too much. It is a lot easier (and effective) to just write a tool that can bring the content in the format that I want, and hope that it can be useful for others.

    The thing is, this tool is definitely built for the 90%, and the reason that it is working it precisely because of that. I am closer to leave reddit altogether because this tool lets me read things here. The more people are able to do this, the more the network effects will kick in and the easier it will be for the communities to move. It won’t be “forced”, but we will get to the point where the majority will be able to say “it’s fine either way by me, so I might as well do it from lemmy”.