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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!!
Simply put, because there's value. Transportation is also a nerdy subject ("trainspotting" anyone?). And Malaysian public transportation, that's not really a paultan subject matter kan.
I don't think there's anything wrong with themed weeks but planning for it has to be guided by what's clearly being preferred by site usage, and it's both too early for data and also too early in the cooking (of people lepakking) imo. To get people to come and stay, it's got to be a comm that's got enough energy and activity in those themes, so even if they drop off a bit, they'll remember the vibe to check in. Better I think at this point on how to encourage ppl to feel less shy about commenting then eventually posting fresh threads. Today already in cafe chat ada yang drop in because the other site feels dead. So I think the sticky idea is great! I think the fact we have and can make maaaany malaysia-specific subs is already a point worth emphasizing. Each sub can be its own theme, yanno? That might be a way to look at it for the first go around.
Hmmmmmmm. Maybe the way to do the r/my sticky / theme weeks is like a themed but general update. The point of the theme is 50% to keep the sticky fresh for r/my readers, 50% to bootstrap our site one community at a time. So the call to action is to come hang out on the site more generally. Kinda like:
Hey guise, this is what's happening on monyet.cc this week!
I guess I'm mindful that we're solving a chicken-and-egg problem as we go. No users means no content. No content means no users. We have to kinda attack both sides at once IMO. We can't expect to keep asking a relatively fixed userbase to dig deep and contribute more content than is sustainable for them!
Yeah can -- those examples sound good!