Growing the site / proposed measures (self.meta)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by dcx to c/meta

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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!!

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[-] Annoyed_Crabby 8 points 1 year ago

I'm sorry for not giving input before this, i'm just mentally not available for this past few days. So i just gonna post my feedback here:

We have a tons of communities and interest, but if you haven't noticed yet, the activity level aren't great.
Even with the highest user count community, !cafe, the post count is still 37 total, or 1.85 post per day, the rest is daily scheduled thread. Which is a lot for a small site like this one.
This isn't meant to discount the effort of everyone who generate content, for that, i sincerely thank everyone for their effort(luv you guys), but this is to highlight we're still not there yet to even begin to do this cross promotion.
What we need now is retention of the current active and newer member, the stuff that make people wanna stick around. This could be anything, familiar face, place to chitchat, content they enthusiastic about, etc etc. We shouldn't discount any community that will make people stay, regardless of what other site's stats said.
IMO, !cafe fit this bill, and already are a place where people keep coming back to, and i thank @imaginelizard for running this one. It's the highest active user count, it's the most casual and cosy community, and people generally just want to have a place to chitchat without create any post.
I believe the reply to this comment speaks what this community is thinking, and why a lot of people doesn't stick around.
We're barely a month old, and the water haven't even heat up yet. Creating more site visit/signup just to fulfill the kpi is just meaningless at this point, as we're running too thin on consistency. We'll just see what we see the first week, people flock in, people flock out, 0 retention.
Give it a few more months, and we'll see if we're ready to do any crosspromo thing, could be sooner with an event hosted exclusively here. For now passively direct people here with the occasional shout out would be best IMHO.

I honestly doesn't know what this new community about. The following is just my honest opinion about it and represent no one, and i hope i don't sound too harsh.
I'm not sure what others think, but to me, Monyet.cc IS Malaysia.
This site is mostly about Malaysia; the news, the politic, the topic, the meme, the pic, the question, etc. When people want content not of Malaysia, they be browsing lemmy.world or lemmy.ml.
Unless you intended for this site to be merely a portal for people to use Lemmy and Fediverse, this new community create unwanted redundancy and confusion for newcomers.
As an admin, one should have a clear goal when create and seeding a community. All community created must serve a unique purpose, even when it overlap with another community, as long as it can have their own unique feature, the overlapping is irrelevant. Have to lead by example, and inspire people to do the same.
Maybe i'm stupid, and i think i am, but I just cannot see or foresee a future where !Malaysia doesn't have any overlapping content. It's just too general to stand on its own.

My view is, if you wanna grow this site, create and seed the community like you will do with your farm in Stardew Valley. Only clear the part you wanna plant your crops, and help others with their works when you done water your field. If you cannot handle the whole farm, there's no need to clean the whole farm, you will only create a whole patch of empty land you have no time to use. It need time and dedication to do it.

[-] cendawanita 5 points 1 year ago

Maybe we can turn !Malaysia as a place for stickies on navigating the other subs, and also for gwailos who need travel-related questions. It's worth exploring ... It that's the first comm they see, so it becomes a lobby/landing area?

The rest I +1

[-] dcx 2 points 1 year ago

Hmmm probably worth investigating what the other country instances are doing with theirs! No question that it's succeeding for them. (I'll do a bit more legwork when time permits)

[-] dcx 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

I think much of your comments are around user retention.
- I 100% agree that retention is a big and real problem we have. E.g. I'm hearing lots of complaints about how hard it is to get into Lemmy (esp with 0.17.4 and the crap app support).
- In fact, this is an excellent point: I'll start thinking about how to get us some retention metrics (% new users who end up sticking around)
That said, most of these measures are aimed at solving a separate but related problem, which is user acquisition – creating sources of new users to balance churn:
- Everyone who is here got here either through a r/malaysia sticky or the lemmyverse.
- The problem I'm seeing is that retention will never be 100%. There will always be a churn rate, where some % of users leave every week.
- Example: If our churn rate is 5% of users per week (say that's 10 users), and our retention rate is 10%, every week we must convince 100 users to come try us, or else our active userbase shrinks!
- That's why I'm hoping to create funnels which attract eyeballs from r/my (theme weeks) and the lemmyverse (!Malaysia) on a regular basis, even if we don't keep most of them.
User acquisition and retention work hand-in-hand though.
- There's no point driving millions of users here if keep zero because the site sucks
- But if the site is great but we don't have regular flows of new users, churn will kill us in a few months just the same :(
Thinking about your input has been very clarifying btw. I completely agree that we need get much better at user retention too. I'll stew on this.

monyet.cc's value proposition

IMO, the question we don't have clear answers to yet is, what makes users stick around in the long term?
I think the theory you're going on is that building a warmer and livelier cafe will do it
- This might be true, we all love !cafe :)
- My concern is that what we're doing there "competes" directly with r/my's daily thread, r/mys, and LYN's kopitiam.
- So this might not be enough to convince users to stick around just by itself. We may need to offer some other differentiation.
- Most of us early users are committed to the idea of building a new colony. But normies get their value in other ways!
The other theory I have is that some users may stick around if we have (a) "deep" feeds of local content they can't get on r/my and r/mys (Malaysian dating, hobbies, investment), which are (b) structured in a way that they can't get on LYN (best content upvoted, deeply threaded discussions)
- This is totally untested as well, but IMO it's worth testing. Because if true, this is an untapped resource that we can build on.
- For example, if we have a strong !cars community, every car obsessive we remove from r/malaysia for Rule 3 can be sent here to grow the site
This is definitely still an open question though, I think the only way to find out is to run the experiments!
- But more thinking and ideas are super welcome so we can keep sharpening as we go!

!Malaysia

Hmm yeah, we still need more clarity on how to use this. E.g. I just figured out that like on reddit, crossposting splits the comment sections :(
But there's super strong evidence that this is an important acquisition funnel - have a look at the community lists by size: lemmy.ca, aussie.zone, feddit.uk
I don't think it's an accident that all three have a !Country community at the top. I suspect what is happening here is that many Fediverse / Lemmyverse users already have a home base elsewhere (e.g. on lemmy.world), but want a single !Country sub from us, that they can add to their feed
And if we can get on users' feeds, that's a gateway to our other communities!

[-] Annoyed_Crabby 3 points 1 year ago

But if the site is great but we don’t have regular flows of new users, churn will kill us in a few months just the same :(

We do have regular flow of new user. Yes the growth might have been slow, maybe not what you expected, but we still do.

For example, if we have a strong !cars community, every car obsessive we remove from r/malaysia for Rule 3 can be sent here to grow the site

This is exactly what i meant by passively promoting.

But there’s super strong evidence that this is an important acquisition funnel - have a look at the community lists by size: lemmy.ca, aussie.zone, feddit.uk

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.

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.

[-] dcx 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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...)

[-] dcx 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Finally had some space to reply!

Re: Why now

First, I feel like we're still at a very dangerous point, where if this place gets quiet for a few days, or some dumb thing happens (like minor drama), or 2-3 regular commenters quit the site, enough people may drift away that the site can go into a death spiral and not recover. We're much safer than we were a week ago. But we are not safe yet. I have a very strong instinct about this: building a community is like kindling a fire. It's easy to keep a strong fire burning. Users get a lot of value from a big site (e.g. people are hating reddit but still visit). But a small flame goes out in one small gust. The more users we have, the more wind resistant we will be.
Second, I feel we need to get in the habit / practice of having regular user inflows from larger channels. I feel that passive word-of-mouth growth is not trustworthy for sustaining us over longer periods, and I would like the site to be larger to avoid a death spiral. And the sooner we do it, the better for us. More users means more content, means funner site! And sure the site's a little undercooked now, but it's always going to be undercooked in some ways... and more importantly, the people who join at the early promo waves are the type of people we need anyway. Research in marketing has shown that (1) early adopters are okay with things being janky (they prioritise novelty more), and (2) it takes 1-2 dozen exposures to a product or service before mainstream users will give it a try. So the users we get in early promotion waves will be the right ones!
I agree that the site seems to be starting to show signs of growth though via our passive flows! The main numbers I am watching are the daily active users count + daily thread comment counts, and these have been sitting very still until just recently. That's the thing that was giving me concern. (Like, if we are seeing new names pop up, and the daily actives aren't going up, that means we're churning users quite hard...)

Re: !Malaysia

I agree that this is not ideal given we have so many other overlapping subs. I tried crossposting and that sucked, it creates a whole new and separate empty comments section.
But I still strongly believe that we should have a country-level "subreddit replacement". Without this, there is no obvious flagship country community for Malaysia who come to the Lemmyverse via other channels than r/Malaysia. We're doing our country a disservice by not having this; I'm willing to do a little legwork to fix this issue.
I'm looking into ways to work around this. There may be a technical solution. Maybe we can create a "virtual" community, which aggregates the feeds of a few real subs. Or less good, maybe we can relocate !news. Country-level subs have different characters on reddit, and some countries do pure news subs. It's not necessarily wrong. E.g. r/Australia is very news heavy, most of the more cosy stuff happens in state or city-level subs.

[-] Annoyed_Crabby 2 points 1 year ago

Just a very quick reply, imma propose something on notion soon, i'll give your answer a read later on 👌

[-] weecious 5 points 1 year ago

Just my 2 cents.

For now making a new sub/community is still free for all, I think it's about time we set some rules. a. Are NSFW and NSFL sub/community allowed? b. Should we have a quorum on new sub/community registration?
A server-wide rules are required. Now the community is still small, and thus we don't have much contents yet to draw people to comment. When the numbers do come in, we inevitably will have nyets who are way too opinionated and may cross the line by being racist, hateful, and generally trolling and flaming. I believe rules will be needed to ensure discussions remain polite and fruitful without delving into a mudslinging, low effort flaming/trolling attempt, while at the same time preserving the freedom of speech. Nyets are welcome to comment (freedom of speech), but they have to be respectful (no freedom from consequences).

This is just what I had in mind, welcome discussions on this. I haven't been on reddit much, and I do hope this place grows.

[-] cendawanita 4 points 1 year ago

On the subject of comms creation:

Kepada mods, admin, owner dan korang sekian: should we start an Events comm? I'm really trying to wean myself off the corposocmed but all these NGO and event announcements s all still there and I was wondering if it's worth starting a comm just to compile all these announcements? At least then we all can share share here and help to become a unique resource also?

[-] rom1215_ 4 points 1 year ago

That’d be quite interesting! To have a place to share/promote good events around.

[-] Annoyed_Crabby 1 points 1 year ago

Hmm, maybe we can crowdsource it then post it on cafe every start of the week on what event is happening that week?

[-] cendawanita 1 points 1 year ago

If can rephrase to what events we saw the notice of that week also can? Because that's as much mental energy I have ("oh announcement! I go post") 🤣

[-] Annoyed_Crabby 2 points 1 year ago

Haha, also can, like we post about the bon odori. If i have mental energy left today, imma try create a google sheet for it 🙈

[-] cendawanita 1 points 1 year ago

🥳🥳

[-] dcx 1 points 1 year ago

A late vote of agreement – events could be a really fun weekly post or standalone subreddit!

[-] dcx 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] weecious 2 points 1 year ago

keep this completely free and easy for as long as possible.

Sure, no issue with this, but my main concern is, how are we going to handle NSFW & NSFL communities? Will those be allowed?

[-] dcx 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've been thinking about this. This is an excellent question and I don't have a good answer yet.

Unsafe stuff is part of the human experience. It seems artificial and a little sad to block off this whole aspect of being a person
Reddit proves that it's possible to host this content without degenerating
Not to mention this might be a kinda fun way of growing the userbase if done right. I remember that laporan kongkek era haha
But I am very concerned that hosting this would skew the composition of the userbase and overall frontpage in unhealthy ways
Not to mention create some very gross and annoying kinds of administrative work
I also agree that it's wise to have a decision about this upfront. Either decision will annoy a fair chunk of the userbase, and each have very different implications. So we should be extra thoughtful and strategic.

What is your opinion?

[-] cendawanita 3 points 1 year ago

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

[-] dancybee 4 points 1 year ago

I have to say that the fastest way I grew a subreddit was by submitting posts regularly over a very long time - but I'm not familiar with fediverse all - there has to be a place where it can be seen.

Back when Geocities was new and search engines doesn't exist yet, the only way to be found was basically when other sites has your links. Can we put links to other country communities and so have a reason to contact them having ours linked there (let's discuss having all the country communities link each other!!),

[-] dancybee 2 points 1 year ago

Also, unique resources. How about...a day and night market locations megathread, stuff like that.

[-] cendawanita 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, that last part is definitely I did on my fedi account, but agree, we should shout out the other threadiverse M'sia comms also

[-] cendawanita 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

What I'm sorta doing, by accident (because I blur sotong), is in my news posts, I ask clarifications on what I'm reading/sharing. I think most ppl feel not ready or segan or just not their thing to make new posts/new links, but they're exactly the right kind of ppl to comment. Having that also helps in retention because all that doesn't have to be seen as sembang kosong. Esp with twt also macam nak condemn and fb is what it is, and TikTok is hard to follow discussions, this can be a spot (in a way like LY.n) where you can track the general discussions important to us for the day. Like, I got rly good info to understand the whole nicotine issue. That sort of thing is useful!

The c/transport can be a big draw here too, for similar reasons. But yeah, no need yet themed weeks just yet, need to see what's organically sustainable, because it depends a lot on personally motivated users. Like the c/K-drama - that's just genius, frankly, if enough ppl layan.

(Still memendam hasrat for c/kakiwayang. I'll think about it lol) ETA: nvm lololol u/penangkia sudah set up hehheeh

[-] dcx 1 points 1 year ago

I agree that kdrama is quite genius. Great idea @penangkia!!

In my mind, the primary reason for theme weeks is to give us a good excuse to post a sticky to r/Malaysia, for user acquisition reasons. We will wear out our welcome super fast if we just keep stickying "come try monyet.cc". We need to give them fresh reasons to give us their attention every time we promote the site!

Hmmm I have to admit I still don't fully understand why !transport is so compelling. What is it about this that users find so interesting? I don't see any parallels on reddit or elsewhere. But the posts are clearly getting upvotes.

[-] cendawanita 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] dcx 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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!

This week/fortnight/etc we're bootstrapping !malaysian_dating, come help us build this new sub up by sharing your dating woes / funny stories and posting personal ads
We're doing daily food pic threads, come share your lunch with us
And also we've upgraded to 0.18.1, there are now ez apps, password reset works, we've fixed problems xyz

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!

[-] cendawanita 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah can -- those examples sound good!

[-] AwesomeSteve 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I suggest mods to spent less effort on the other platform, and focus on here. Post some exclusive contents here, lure monyets from r/malaysia here and ditch the r/malaysia.

Viral, controversial, exclusive contents here not r/malaysia, maybe that will stick, I stopped using reddit since July 1, mods also need to show determination for changes.

The way i see is Reddit is becoming the Digg, Slashdot...and Yahoo.

[-] weecious 3 points 1 year ago

Lemmy isn't meant to replace r/malaysia, as mentioned by @dcx here https://monyet.cc/post/18882, but an alternative to r/my should it die.

[-] zen@nixnet.social 1 points 1 year ago

just wondering how the pict-rs storage usage is like, I've heard that it increases very rapidly, due to the caching of images from remote instances.

with the stable release of pict-rs 0.4.0, admins of medium and large instances are now able to move to object storage to keep costs down.

if there's any intention of migrating, you should do so before the large amount of images make uploading them to object storage difficult.

as you want to continue growing your userbase, this must be given serious consideration.

[-] dcx 1 points 1 year ago

Very cool, thanks for the heads up. We will put this on the backlog, I agree that we should set ourselves up with a scalable pattern for this.

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[-] ruk_n_rul 1 points 1 year ago

Re: 4.2 -
I've been meaning to set up a submission thread for !pics@monyet.cc's header and a discussion thread on !transport@monyet.cc, I guess now's a good time as any. It just sucks that for the last few days now I don't have access to my PC.

Re: 4.3 -

Not sure. Having everything public on Lemmy has its merits but could be noisy (and nosey).
Discord might work but antithetical to the spirit of the platform -tho tbc I don't have problem with it.
Lemmy's DM supports Matrix integration but I haven't set mine up. Idk if it has group DMs like Discord.

[-] cendawanita 1 points 1 year ago

On the part of encouraging ppl to check stuff out... Here's how a Lemmy post federates to my feed on a Mastodon fork, compared to how a kbin one looks (using the Fedilab client)

Kbin pushes out the first 2 lines min plus user pic AND all the tags used. The magazine/community also gets its own hashtag. It's a lot nicer to boost to randos, they immediately get what I'm sharing (because sometimes those link previews don't work so fast)

Here's how a monyet post looks on kbin.social (the main instance but not the only kbin instance). can I boost this version/copy instead? Sure I can, but crapshoot on how well the comments come back here. 100% success from kbin.social accounts so far tho.

On my calckey instance tho, nothing is fetched, or fetched well (so far) - this can be a concern because there's more & more ppl using *key softwares rather than the mastos, but that is down the line.

Within the fediverse regardless, discoverability is via hashtags, so one way monyets can start adopting is using them at the start. But that is still a suggestion.

[-] dcx 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Wow, thanks for sharing! That's a lot of different experiences; it's quite confusing to know what to optimise for. What do you think the main pool of fediverse users is primarily using? (Or is the userbase fairly evenly distributed?)

My current inclination is to treat fediverse integration as a fringe benefit, where we primarily get traffic via !Malaysia, and focus on building us up as a site which is a complete experience on its own, and attracts its own traffic.

[-] cendawanita 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] dcx 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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)

[-] cendawanita 2 points 1 year ago

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).

this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023

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