In a way I think we might need to cannibalize the main sub a lil by doing exclusive content here instead like the upcoming election megathread. Big events like this was a big draw and boost to the subscribers count for the past few years. Or perhaps there's an opportunity to tap into the Malay and Chinese online demographic by doing a similar megathread for those demographics instead. That way this instance is not competing for the same crowd as the main sub.

Yeah, I think doing it in the daily chat thread is kind of random. I'm up for hosting a discussion on any other platform too, whichever is the most convenient.

For r/my, on top of what you mentioned, I think there are some other downsides, and Lemmy can offer much more in those aspects

1. Only 2 maximum pinned posts, while for here there's a pinned post for monyet.cc, but each community can also have their own pinned post. I think this would really come in handy, and you don't need to keep rotating the pinned posts.
2. On Reddit, everything is bundled together, and you'll see everything regardless whether it'll be something you're interested in. But here you can only subscribe to local communities that you want to see! I kind of dislike the fact that there is no category for subscribed local communities however, since I mainly subscribe to other instances for stuff like news and updates.
3. No ads? XD

Man, i wish i have half your positivity in my life hahaha

Regarding of direction, i agree that what we need is to not reach content parity with r/my. So far what we have here in a week time, it's all duplication of the reddit site, with the exception of the mandarin sub, courtesy of vin, but since we only have like a handful of people active here, i don't think we can do much at this point, at least in my limited knowledge of running a community.

So far i feels what we can do here is to be patient a little bit, and let people warm up to these fediverse thing, let the concept cook a bit more in the oven and the politic ease off a bit. To me it's roughly the same thing as reddit but to them it's a much complicated way to reddit, a daunting way to entertainment, to say the least. Accessibility is also one big problem right now. Been talking with friend group and most feels like the web ui isn't intuitive enough compared to the reddit official app, which say quite a lot. We could pull a thousand people but lemmy will push 999 back to reddit, none of which will be our fault. The third party app race is only begun not too long ago, and since we have very small active user count, might as well wait along.

As for the lurker, i feels like it best not to call out for them, they will join the conversation when they feels comfortable to.

But let say in the near future we have a bit more active user per day, then perhaps we can run stuff like ITAP contest, or maybe meetup(or just move reddit meetup hosting to here? That wouldn't be fair i think). Inktober is near as well, we could run it here in c/pics. Was thinking of secret santa as well, but that's a bit far off into the future.

I think the main difference of this place is, you can create any community you want, post something, and everyone in this place will see it. Back in reddit you have to run around promoting your niche sub, so it's quite different here. Whether people will find this as a pulling force it still remain to be seen.

Ohh and we need a food community for foodie lol.

Okay that's all i have in my empty mind lol

It's going to be tough doing it. HP did it very well for /r/Malaysians. I believe she did it by organizing events. If this site has the tools similar to reddit, tapping into existing mod team's experience, there should be a way to continue sustaining life.

Btw, this server is paid? Wondering since we have our own domain name.