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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!!
Hmm I agree we're almost at the point where we need structure on point 2. I'll try to get to this in the next 2-3 weeks. So far each community is doing very well and our users are chill. But you're right, if we succeed in growing the site, this is coming.
On point 1, I'd like to keep this completely free and easy for as long as possible. Treating reddit itself as a case study, there's nothing wrong with having subs with slightly weird names, or reclaiming them if neglected. There's way more benefit from giving people the feeling that they can create absolutely any subcommunity they want here! That's something both r/my and LYN can't offer. I'm hoping an admin-mod coordination channel will be sufficient to resolve any frictions until we're way larger.
Sure, no issue with this, but my main concern is, how are we going to handle NSFW & NSFL communities? Will those be allowed?
I've been thinking about this. This is an excellent question and I don't have a good answer yet.
What is your opinion?
It does sound like a code of conduct or server code of conduct would be necessary. I'm ok with nsfw content but just for the sake legal liability maybe not visual content that's explicit and clearly referring to carnal relations or erotica. But talking about sex (generally) shouldn't be bannable