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Growing the site / proposed measures
(self.meta)
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!!
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.
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
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)