21
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 can see where you're coming from since your experience is via reddit and hearing about Lemmy. Just that I want to say that all Lemmy instances are part of the fediverse, so to say integration as a fringe benefit doesn't make sense - it comes in built-in. People were checking out the kbin/Lemmy instances not just because via reddit - fedi people heard there are more instances now so that's why we menyibuk and started looking. Fedi people had been asking on how to add Lemmy and kbin to our timelines even before Reddit Migration - it's just that redditors sped up the timeline significantly with actual human activity.
On our end of Fedi, the Southeast Asians have been steadily building up an ecosystem (persistently and with intention) since November 2022, crowdsourcing unique hashtags, making posts with those content, respectively according to our individual interests making connections and links to people who want to make their feed less Western-centric (it's a whole discourse). I'm glad that it seems to be sustainable enough that even with me making my one hinky post, you guys got a traffic bump.
All of that to say, fediverse is you guys too. So anyway, to respond on what to optimize: outside of the Lemmy ecosystem, I would say: hashtags x100. That's literally how ppl are finding the SEA ppl content. That's how I found you guys! (Because the posts we tagged #Malaysia went to the kbin.social/m/Malaysia section for all microblogs, and one of the redditors who were browsing all these newly made magazines found our posts and started commenting)
I don't think it needs to be an ironclad rule but worth adding to your guide/faq - hashtags for discoverability. I've done zero promotion for m/magASEAN... But I keep getting new subscribers.
Wow, extremely interesting, thanks for sharing! It's strange how different every cluster's practices are. Over here it isn't even clear where hashtags should go, and there's zero builtin facility for using them to sort or search afaict.
I'd prefer not to request this practice from users until I understand how this ties together more clearly. But I'm adding this to the list to work through. I'm building up a bit of thinking regarding Lemmy plugin infrastructure / forks at the moment, perhaps hashtag support is a key feature for our use case.
(Edit: Also, I could be wrong, but so far my strong feeling is that for most Malaysian users, we will be a single home base site, the same way r/malaysia is to many of our regulars there. So the majority case will be the experience of our instance's frontpage, despite all the additional capabilities. I am going to run some stats to understand this better)
Yeah no worries, I'm also sorry I can't give you much advice - pre-reddit, Lemmy dev was seriously cincai and slow (I mean, it's 4 years old kot) and among the issues it was having (aside from the tankies) is how it was federating with the rest of fedi. Literally I was checking out kbin a week before monyet.cc because it was still incubating but ppl were ready to check out a non-lemmy alternative. But now that we're here, we'll make do. Eventually by force of the scale of activity there's probably gonna be movement in how to tackle the hashtagging etc.
Don't be glum! Mastodon has been around in 2017 and it's only now that it's seriously adding more 'twitter circa 2021' features (plus others) on its dev roadmap because Eugen Rochko couldn't justify not adding stuff when more and more ppl asked for them -- or in the case of some features, because other fedi platforms dah lama ada! (E.g. post editing only came out this year; but still I have to pay exactly zero dollars monthly to get that unlike blue check twitter. And my instance already sets a 1000-character limit).