I think Lemmy and Mbin's interfaces scare some people off. A lot of users don't know that Lemmy has plenty of other third-party interfaces like Photon, Alexandrite, Voyager, and of course, Old.
Mbin lacks these for now, but makes up for it with the rarely-used custom CSS for magazines, just like Old Reddit, and custom JS too! I use mine to create a two-column layout with big thumbnails! Unfortunately, the CSS doesn't federate and is only visible when viewing it on Fedia itself. I'd love to have even a Lemmy-like banner image on other instances.
For the daily word puzzle Wordle, !wordle and /r/Wordle both benefit from having a bot post a discussion thread for each day's puzzle as it's released. I go there every day and post how I did on the day's puzzle. I still post and moderate on the Reddit one every once in a while, but I tell them about the Lemmy one while I'm there. The recently-created !dailygames does this for several daily puzzle games, but I'm not sure if it's a stronger community or just more cluttered.
Of course, we could remind Reddit users that the Fediverse doesn't have ads! That was a huge selling point for me.
I have essentially given up on the one and only community I created. I opened !engineering when I first came to Lemmy, and did my best to regularly post interesting things. It was really exciting when I hit 500 subscribers, too! Unfortunately, I ran out of steam before the community took off. I also moved my time and attention elsewhere. At this point c/engineering is dead unless someone else picks up the baton.
Sorry for the rant. But it felt good to get that out.
This is one of those things that I'm planning to work on more actively soon!
I think it can be an effective way to help people find Lemmy, and it will work better if that the focus is on letting people know that the option exists (rather than being pushy about it).
Which community to work with
IMO it's the best community to work on might be one that you are already familiar or active with. If you have a good reputation with the mods already, they will be more likely to listen to your idea. Similarly, some subreddits will benefit from having a space on Lemmy more than others.
What benefits to highlight
I've been busy with some other things for some time, but when I was last working on this with a few subreddits, the main benefits were:
A lot of users don't want to have to use Reddit, and many have already stopped using Reddit. Having a similar community without ads/tracking with the same moderation team will go a long way to helping those people stay involved
A well known backup community is very helpful. Some subreddits serve important purposes and even temporary outages on Reddit can affect time sensitive questions. Meanwhile, there have been cases where entire subreddits were removed in error (ex. automated systems reacting to mass reporting), and users had no idea what happened. It's helpful to have a second place that everyone knows to check for updates in those situations.
Potential process
bring up the idea, and offer to help with the set up and day to day moderation
work with the current mods to make moderation consistent between the platforms, so that the experience is similar
see if some of the mods want to make accounts here so that they can rest easy knowing they have moderation permissions here, even if they don't use it day to day
Once both communities are linked, there's a chance for trust to build and users will feel more comfortable knowing that the Fediverse community is an 'official' one. That can be helped by having information in the sidebar, a pinned post, and/or a note on the submission page, etc.
Day to Day
This requires having an account on Reddit and being somewhat active on it. Users are more likely to explore the fediverse if they see content from it. Some ideas could be
A weekly "here's what you missed from Lemmy"
Sharing any major updates about Lemmy / the fediverse community
If there is an important post that could benefit from reaching more people, then letting the OP know that they can post here as well
We had a few such attempts in the past, but experience shows that Reddit mods have limited influence on that. Even if they are really trying to move over people it ends up being only a small minority and after a few weeks/months they all go back.
What we need is more homegrown communities that grow naturally by attracting people.
What we need is more homegrown communities that grow naturally by attracting people.
That's probably the biggest issue.
How are people supposed to hear about Lemmy at the moment?
a few subs like /r/RedditAlternatives
a comment that might mention it, but quickly removed or deleted
Reddit got really popular when it started to become the "one place to find answers about anything". And it still is to an extend. While Reddit is still there, it will be hard for Lemmy to really emerge.
We've been stagnating at 48k-50k for the last few months, there is a risk of more and more people leaving over time, leading to the end of the platform
I wish I could find more Healthcare workers. My computer skills make me a bit of an odd duck in hcw spaces, but the fact that there's none on this end doesn't help the isolation either.
We're actually in contact with the r/Medicine moderation team over in !medicine. We never ended up formally announcing a partnership / official status because everyone got busy, but it's something I want to go back to at some point. There are a lot of amazing medicine/healthcare communities on Reddit that could benefit from an alternative here
That seems to be mostly news Articles and interested laypeople. I need a community where I can bitch about patients throwing piss and punches and me and console others with similar stories.
I don't think there are enough medical professionals making that content yet, so in the meantime I've been trying to share news/updates relevant to medical professionals. I'm happy to make any changes to the community to help meet those needs.
It seems to be a chicken-egg situation like other niche communities. While it's mostly laypeople right now, it might just need a few medical professionals to start making text posts there, and then others can find the community over time.
I miss xbox and playstation (all their permutations). Also malelivingspace. The other subbreddits are starting to get vague in my mind. I have been here for a year, so I don’t remember the others.
!animation is doing pretty well. Last couple of weeks I have started getting other people posting so I'm not feeling as pressured to find something to post every day. There was also a lot of news to share due to the recent Annecy festival. Now that it's over, the associated subscriber growth has slowed down a little bit, but I do have some ideas to have more discussion and conversation starters rather than mostly just news all the time.
!electricvehicles is doing well, as is !avs. I would like more content over at !selfhosted but it's organic and that will come in time. Football is a dilemma because there's no moderator there, so even when I check it out, there's six old posts stuck there. Other than that, I'm kinda just floating around. I probably need to mods for some of the communities that @sabreW4K3 moderates.
Football is a dilemma because there’s no moderator there, so even when I check it out, there’s six old posts stuck there.
There is a mod, they pinned my post about the prediction post. If you see 6 posts pinned, that's probably an issue federation, you can ask the mod to pin/unpin them to unstuck them.
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