Growing the site / proposed measures (self.meta)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by dcx to c/meta

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Hi all, just an update from this post, where we asked for input on site direction and growth. We took these on board, and did some research into what other country instances and forums are doing.

Here's what we propose – input welcome before we start making changes!

1. Theme weeks, aka bootstrapping and promoting communities to r/Malaysia

Malaysians have interests which don't get much airtime on r/my and r/mys, such as badminton, cars, dating, football, gaming, property, etc.
If we can bootstrap a community for a topic, we can promote that to the main sub and see if this brings users across.
This may be as simple as making sure the community has a dozen posts + a few dozen comments before promoting on r/my. So we might try some "theme weeks" to get things rolling!
How about !malaysian_dating as a fun and slightly clickbaity first test?

2. !Malaysia channel

We noticed that lemmy.ca, aussie.zone, and feddit.uk all have a !Country channel, and this is their largest community
We think this is like r/malaysia on reddit: the definitive way for Malaysian nyets on the lemmyverse to get Malaysian content on their feed
So we've set up !Malaysia. Perhaps we can treat this like r/Malaysia ~~and start crossposting country-level content there!~~ (Edit: Some complications, we're still figuring out the optimal pattern for this)

3. Upgrades and mobile apps

We're hearing a bunch of feedback that Lemmy is hard to get into, especially on mobile.
0.18.1 finally dropped today with a bunch of quality-of-life fixes (it's a week late). ~~So we're taking the site down tonight to upgrade! Should be about 15 mins if nothing goes wrong.~~ Upgrade complete!
~~Once we're up to date, we'll add recommendations for trusted iOS and Android apps to our switching guide!~~ Recommendations added!

4. Improving moderator coordination

The admin team's main role with growth is to create opportunities for r/Malaysia users to visit and give us a try. But once they get here, we need communities' help to convince them to create an account and stick around!
And this will only happen if the whole experience is compelling: Sticky and unique content, good discussions, an interesting default frontpage.
We feel this may need closer coordination with community mods. What works best? Should we start a Discord? Long-lived !meta post? Some other channel?
We're also working towards getting you community stats. Subscriber growth charts, comments per post, pageviews, uniques, etc.

Input and ideas of all kinds super welcome. Thanks for joining us on the journey of building this place up!!

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[-] Annoyed_Crabby 8 points 1 year ago

I'm sorry for not giving input before this, i'm just mentally not available for this past few days. So i just gonna post my feedback here:

We have a tons of communities and interest, but if you haven't noticed yet, the activity level aren't great.
Even with the highest user count community, !cafe, the post count is still 37 total, or 1.85 post per day, the rest is daily scheduled thread. Which is a lot for a small site like this one.
This isn't meant to discount the effort of everyone who generate content, for that, i sincerely thank everyone for their effort(luv you guys), but this is to highlight we're still not there yet to even begin to do this cross promotion.
What we need now is retention of the current active and newer member, the stuff that make people wanna stick around. This could be anything, familiar face, place to chitchat, content they enthusiastic about, etc etc. We shouldn't discount any community that will make people stay, regardless of what other site's stats said.
IMO, !cafe fit this bill, and already are a place where people keep coming back to, and i thank @imaginelizard for running this one. It's the highest active user count, it's the most casual and cosy community, and people generally just want to have a place to chitchat without create any post.
I believe the reply to this comment speaks what this community is thinking, and why a lot of people doesn't stick around.
We're barely a month old, and the water haven't even heat up yet. Creating more site visit/signup just to fulfill the kpi is just meaningless at this point, as we're running too thin on consistency. We'll just see what we see the first week, people flock in, people flock out, 0 retention.
Give it a few more months, and we'll see if we're ready to do any crosspromo thing, could be sooner with an event hosted exclusively here. For now passively direct people here with the occasional shout out would be best IMHO.

I honestly doesn't know what this new community about. The following is just my honest opinion about it and represent no one, and i hope i don't sound too harsh.
I'm not sure what others think, but to me, Monyet.cc IS Malaysia.
This site is mostly about Malaysia; the news, the politic, the topic, the meme, the pic, the question, etc. When people want content not of Malaysia, they be browsing lemmy.world or lemmy.ml.
Unless you intended for this site to be merely a portal for people to use Lemmy and Fediverse, this new community create unwanted redundancy and confusion for newcomers.
As an admin, one should have a clear goal when create and seeding a community. All community created must serve a unique purpose, even when it overlap with another community, as long as it can have their own unique feature, the overlapping is irrelevant. Have to lead by example, and inspire people to do the same.
Maybe i'm stupid, and i think i am, but I just cannot see or foresee a future where !Malaysia doesn't have any overlapping content. It's just too general to stand on its own.

My view is, if you wanna grow this site, create and seed the community like you will do with your farm in Stardew Valley. Only clear the part you wanna plant your crops, and help others with their works when you done water your field. If you cannot handle the whole farm, there's no need to clean the whole farm, you will only create a whole patch of empty land you have no time to use. It need time and dedication to do it.

[-] cendawanita 5 points 1 year ago

Maybe we can turn !Malaysia as a place for stickies on navigating the other subs, and also for gwailos who need travel-related questions. It's worth exploring ... It that's the first comm they see, so it becomes a lobby/landing area?

The rest I +1

[-] dcx 2 points 1 year ago

Hmmm probably worth investigating what the other country instances are doing with theirs! No question that it's succeeding for them. (I'll do a bit more legwork when time permits)

[-] dcx 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thanks for the detailed thinking!! Btw to other readers, the way we work on the admin team is to actively invite disagreement, so that we get to see more angles, so that we can make better decisions. (That's why we ask for feedback all the time too!)

User acquisition vs user retention

I think much of your comments are around user retention.
- I 100% agree that retention is a big and real problem we have. E.g. I'm hearing lots of complaints about how hard it is to get into Lemmy (esp with 0.17.4 and the crap app support).
- In fact, this is an excellent point: I'll start thinking about how to get us some retention metrics (% new users who end up sticking around)
That said, most of these measures are aimed at solving a separate but related problem, which is user acquisition – creating sources of new users to balance churn:
- Everyone who is here got here either through a r/malaysia sticky or the lemmyverse.
- The problem I'm seeing is that retention will never be 100%. There will always be a churn rate, where some % of users leave every week.
- Example: If our churn rate is 5% of users per week (say that's 10 users), and our retention rate is 10%, every week we must convince 100 users to come try us, or else our active userbase shrinks!
- That's why I'm hoping to create funnels which attract eyeballs from r/my (theme weeks) and the lemmyverse (!Malaysia) on a regular basis, even if we don't keep most of them.
User acquisition and retention work hand-in-hand though.
- There's no point driving millions of users here if keep zero because the site sucks
- But if the site is great but we don't have regular flows of new users, churn will kill us in a few months just the same :(
Thinking about your input has been very clarifying btw. I completely agree that we need get much better at user retention too. I'll stew on this.

monyet.cc's value proposition

IMO, the question we don't have clear answers to yet is, what makes users stick around in the long term?
I think the theory you're going on is that building a warmer and livelier cafe will do it
- This might be true, we all love !cafe :)
- My concern is that what we're doing there "competes" directly with r/my's daily thread, r/mys, and LYN's kopitiam.
- So this might not be enough to convince users to stick around just by itself. We may need to offer some other differentiation.
- Most of us early users are committed to the idea of building a new colony. But normies get their value in other ways!
The other theory I have is that some users may stick around if we have (a) "deep" feeds of local content they can't get on r/my and r/mys (Malaysian dating, hobbies, investment), which are (b) structured in a way that they can't get on LYN (best content upvoted, deeply threaded discussions)
- This is totally untested as well, but IMO it's worth testing. Because if true, this is an untapped resource that we can build on.
- For example, if we have a strong !cars community, every car obsessive we remove from r/malaysia for Rule 3 can be sent here to grow the site
This is definitely still an open question though, I think the only way to find out is to run the experiments!
- But more thinking and ideas are super welcome so we can keep sharpening as we go!

!Malaysia

Hmm yeah, we still need more clarity on how to use this. E.g. I just figured out that like on reddit, crossposting splits the comment sections :(
But there's super strong evidence that this is an important acquisition funnel - have a look at the community lists by size: lemmy.ca, aussie.zone, feddit.uk
I don't think it's an accident that all three have a !Country community at the top. I suspect what is happening here is that many Fediverse / Lemmyverse users already have a home base elsewhere (e.g. on lemmy.world), but want a single !Country sub from us, that they can add to their feed
And if we can get on users' feeds, that's a gateway to our other communities!

[-] Annoyed_Crabby 3 points 1 year ago

But if the site is great but we don’t have regular flows of new users, churn will kill us in a few months just the same :(

We do have regular flow of new user. Yes the growth might have been slow, maybe not what you expected, but we still do.

For example, if we have a strong !cars community, every car obsessive we remove from r/malaysia for Rule 3 can be sent here to grow the site

This is exactly what i meant by passively promoting.

But there’s super strong evidence that this is an important acquisition funnel - have a look at the community lists by size: lemmy.ca, aussie.zone, feddit.uk

This does not answer my question. Take a look at their community in detail:

Lemmy.ca is a lemmy instance run locally in Canada, but not limited to Canada thing and canadian's community, the community include but not limited: a country(news and everything canada), provinces, a lemmy app(general), woodworking(general), bicycle(general), pcgaming(general), hockey(general), so on and so forth.

Aussie.zone is a lemmy instance run locally in Australia for Australian for Australia thing, and they made it very clear. The community include but not limited: a country(news and everything australia), provinces, finance, politica, etc etc, all within the context of Australia.

Feddit.uk is a lemmy instance run locally in UK for Brits and UK community, but not limited to UK, but mostly still UK related. The community include but not limited: a country(news and everything UK), provinces, politic(for UK), instance(for bugs, issues, improvements, questions, announcement), casual(UK), feelgood sub(UK), feelbad sub(UK), so on and so forth.

Monyet.cc is a lemmy instance run by Malaysian for Malaysian, but not limited to Malaysian stuff. The community include but not limited: Cafe(casual sub, mostly Malaysia related but not limited to), News(Malaysia), Politic(Malaysia), Food(for food and restaurant located in Malaysia, but not limited to Malaysian food), Memes(malaysia and lemmy related), AMG(general), science & tech(malaysia), dating(malaysia), pics(malaysia), ask(malaysia).

Notice the difference between our and theirs? They don't have News, science & tech, and economy business, that three is combined together into their country sub, and everything are nicely labelled in a way to emulate their counterpart from reddit(it's also the reason why our news sub were getting non-malaysian news spam). There is no accident why they all have a country sub and is highest subscribed and activity, because it's designed that way, not because they believe having that will draw in people. If !Malaysia exists today, it will only cause overlap and confusion, unless someone want to handle that sub by doing crosspost from all the other sub, i can only see it getting abandoned.

If we want it to become a landing page, then we can merge it with Announcement, but i'd imagine it won't get the effect you hope for as well because based on your opinion, you want them to subscribe it from other instance and interact with us. This won't fly because they expect to learn thing about Malaysia but all they get is a landing page.

So what we can do if we die die must want !Malaysia? We do what they do and emulate our reddit counterpart. Malaysia(merge news, science & tech, transportation, economy & business), Malaysians(rename cafe), MalaysiaPF(Personal Finance), MalaysiaDating(Dating), MalaysianFood(food), MyHappyPills(care), etc etc. This will achieve what you've hope for and in better effect than just slap one community as a bandaid to what everyone have and hopefully achieve what they get. In return, we can't keep thing like we have here.

We do a rebranding. News change to MalaysianNews, Food change to MalaysianFood, Cafe change to Malaysians/MalaysianCasual, dating change to MalaysianDating. By rebranding i don't mean simply change the display name, but to change the address as well(eg !news to !malaysianews). Rebrand the sub everyone think its the core community of this site. Have a rule set that said all new Malaysian related community(except state) must have Malaysia/malaysian in it, no compromise. Make monyet.cc run like Reddit and all the community name as if we're still in reddit.

Lastly, a question: why do it has to be now? Why can't we revisit the crosspromo a month or two later and let this community cook a bit in the oven so we can see if we can do an event that actually draw people and retain them? Is there a problem you see but can't share with us? Tbh since this is a very hands off process from me, i don't wanna object too much, but i just can't see what you're seeing.

[-] dcx 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Finally had some space to reply!

Re: Why now

First, I feel like we're still at a very dangerous point, where if this place gets quiet for a few days, or some dumb thing happens (like minor drama), or 2-3 regular commenters quit the site, enough people may drift away that the site can go into a death spiral and not recover. We're much safer than we were a week ago. But we are not safe yet. I have a very strong instinct about this: building a community is like kindling a fire. It's easy to keep a strong fire burning. Users get a lot of value from a big site (e.g. people are hating reddit but still visit). But a small flame goes out in one small gust. The more users we have, the more wind resistant we will be.
Second, I feel we need to get in the habit / practice of having regular user inflows from larger channels. I feel that passive word-of-mouth growth is not trustworthy for sustaining us over longer periods, and I would like the site to be larger to avoid a death spiral. And the sooner we do it, the better for us. More users means more content, means funner site! And sure the site's a little undercooked now, but it's always going to be undercooked in some ways... and more importantly, the people who join at the early promo waves are the type of people we need anyway. Research in marketing has shown that (1) early adopters are okay with things being janky (they prioritise novelty more), and (2) it takes 1-2 dozen exposures to a product or service before mainstream users will give it a try. So the users we get in early promotion waves will be the right ones!
I agree that the site seems to be starting to show signs of growth though via our passive flows! The main numbers I am watching are the daily active users count + daily thread comment counts, and these have been sitting very still until just recently. That's the thing that was giving me concern. (Like, if we are seeing new names pop up, and the daily actives aren't going up, that means we're churning users quite hard...)

Re: !Malaysia

I agree that this is not ideal given we have so many other overlapping subs. I tried crossposting and that sucked, it creates a whole new and separate empty comments section.
But I still strongly believe that we should have a country-level "subreddit replacement". Without this, there is no obvious flagship country community for Malaysia who come to the Lemmyverse via other channels than r/Malaysia. We're doing our country a disservice by not having this; I'm willing to do a little legwork to fix this issue.
I'm looking into ways to work around this. There may be a technical solution. Maybe we can create a "virtual" community, which aggregates the feeds of a few real subs. Or less good, maybe we can relocate !news. Country-level subs have different characters on reddit, and some countries do pure news subs. It's not necessarily wrong. E.g. r/Australia is very news heavy, most of the more cosy stuff happens in state or city-level subs.

[-] Annoyed_Crabby 2 points 1 year ago

Just a very quick reply, imma propose something on notion soon, i'll give your answer a read later on 👌

[-] dcx 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Heya, pinging as FYI that I saw this but I'll get back tomorrow! Sorry, this deserves more thought and I don't have any more time for today. :(

(Btw, I also owe you some replies on Notion comments - the dang thing doesn't send notifications when changes are made, but I recently noticed you had left a few comments - sorry as well and thanks!! FYI the technical team was having some trouble with that too and we ended up just manually tagging each other on every response...)

this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023

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