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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!!
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
monyet.cc's value proposition
!Malaysia
We do have regular flow of new user. Yes the growth might have been slow, maybe not what you expected, but we still do.
This is exactly what i meant by passively promoting.
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.
Or
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.
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...)
Finally had some space to reply!
Re: Why now
Re: !Malaysia
Just a very quick reply, imma propose something on notion soon, i'll give your answer a read later on 👌