One of the hurdles to change for users switching from reddit to a federated platform is less content. The logic goes: “smaller community, less content, I can see i’m missing out on stuff over there so I’m not going to switch away”.
One potential solution to this would be automated cross-posting, using bots or similar. Obviously there are cons to this approach, which we are all likely aware of.
What are your thoughts on focusing efforts in this direction to drive faster user growth? Good because it will drive more users to consider jumping ship given that it reduces FOMO? Bad because it makes the place look less community spirited and genuine and different?
The content porting really only means something when it’s not overwhelming and the person doing the content porting is actively planning to participate in the submissions.
The easiest way to get someone to not comment on something is a wall of submissions with a fair number of upvotes and few to no comments. At this point, it’s just a glorious RSS feed rather than an actual community.
Driving user growth actually requires putting in the leg work to make meaningful submissions, following-up on them, commenting on submissions, and upvoting content. All of this takes actual effort though. A bot content porting content from Reddit to Lemmy doesn’t do much and for a number of people, looks much more like artificial engagement rather than any meaningfully sincere attempt at growing a community.
Some of the (World/US) News and Politics related communities are so barren of comments despite the deluge of content porting submissions, while other communities have blown up into their own distinct thing because people are making sincere, organic (enough) submissions.
Very insightful points. I totally agree about the intimidation factor of spamming posts with no comments or organic interaction. But it’s also a fine line, someone needs to be posting something to get the ball rolling.
I also want to continue spreading the word about federation issues. I’ve been on Lemmy for a month now and it’s going great. But that whole time, it’s essentially been impossible to comment on kbin magazines. The comments simply don’t show up. I’m not seeing most of your comments when browsing here from Lemmy, but I am seeing Lemmy comments.
I obviously have this account, but its annoying to keep switching between accounts, plus I haven’t really gotten the hang of the kbin interface yet.
Point being, I suspect much of the sluggishness of organic growth is not due to a small userbase, but rather due to the fact nobody can actually find the threads and comment on them efficiently. We need to remain steadfast and trust that the developers will fix this stuff up soon. I really feel that simply making Lemmy and kbin federate perfectly would immediately make this platform 10 times more active. We have plenty of people but right now we are fragmented into parallel communities. This isn’t even getting into the server overload at a number of Lemmy instances.
I just don’t want people to write off the platform before we can see how it’s actually meant to work. I’ve seen a ton of brilliant comments on kbin and I haven’t even had the chance to really mix it up with you guys yet.
crossposting is great to spread the word. what sucks is that reddit built the feature, and then calls it bRiGaDiNg when you make use of the feature and crosspost something the advertisers/overlords don’t approve (like bad reviews, reddit criticism) and ban you for it. they’re coding these buttons and then forbid you to use them, it’s mental
I feel like the best reddit posts are going to make their way over here anyway, the same way the best tweets, tiktoks, or tumblr posts made their way to reddit.
I don’t think there needs to be a bot reposting everything that gets posted over there, considering all the mod removals and malicious compliance protests mean that overall content quality will likely decline going forward. I can see it getting very spammy very quickly.
Just post what you want.
Smaller communities may mean fewer posts, but once a community hits a critical limit, it’s still more posts than most people will read in a day.
This is only really an issue for really niche communities that haven’t migrated here yet, and if all they find here when they come to explore is the exact same posts as on Reddit, but with no comments, then what’s even the point of moving?
If they didn’t come out of the principle of what Reddit is doing, then it will be the content that ultimately makes them move. And that content needs to be different, and better, than what they can get on Reddit. Not the same, but with zero comments.
This question gets asked every day almost. We don’t need to do that. Just be active here and post. Browse under all and not local and you will see posts from other instances and see way more content.
Now that I’ve been here a couple of weeks, kbin.social is chock full of recent reddit immigrants saying we need this, this, and this. Are these people going to do the programming? Nope.
We need to focus on posting, responding and communicating so that this place has more content.
People who will remain at an exploitative corporate website to avoid the inconvenience are not people I’m interested in trying to sell the fediverse to.
If there’s something that interests you or you think will benefit others, post it
Some of the forums I’m subscribed to are using bots and honestly I don’t like it at all and I’m far less likely to engage
Yeh I have noticed the same. With no interaction it makes it look like a ghost town
Eh? The only cross-posts I’d want to see are legitimate news- but I feel someone will just post that news here anyway.
Reddit just put itself at the end of the content website human centepede. Why bother re-inserting the 6-time digested poop somewhere further up the centepede?
[One potential solution to this would be automated cross-posting]
You’ve just described Usenet, which had this feature 40 years ago
I have mixed feelings towards the repost bots. I see no value in pure reposts from Reddit, but I also have no issue with them IF they only post on dedicated instances and mark the account it’s posting from as a bot. Those posts have no engagement. Most people either disable bot posts in settings or block then once they see them. There is nothing wrong with growing communities slowly, but with organic content or only reposting the most interesting stuff.
Libreddit reposts only
