Harr work is so crunchy right now. Currently rushing to publish some research paper. Very exciting but it always takes way more time than you plan for (even when you know it takes longer time than you plan for)

If you sent me a message and are wondering why I ghosted

ima catch up later in the week, I swear :<

I'm a huge believer in moving in together before marriage if at all possible. Would strongly strongly recommend. I had an experience many years ago with this, where I learned my partner and I worked great up to that level but not beyond it. Thank GOD we didn't get married before finding out.

Lots of people have that story where you have a friend you really like, and then you become roommates and they make you crazy. Imagine that but it's for life and also you make a kid with them so you're sorta trapped. Why would you put yourself through that without a trial period???

On a what now?

Oh no, am I the weirdo!?? (Yeah I know I'm a weirdo :')

I don't think it's wrong to be in regular contact btw. And I guess I have other ways to express care, like I don't mind spending solid chunks of time on relationship-related projects. But I'm the kind of person who has a hard time sticking to stable routines, so having this always-on obligation to send messages/ be responsive to messages feels super heavy to me.

Please don't let me be the only one! Haha.

Aaaaa I'm in this photo and I don't like it :< I think I might be #2 and #9, ask me anything lol

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!

Upgrade complete, we're now on 0.18.1! Feedback welcome if you run into bugs and bad behavior!

Supermarket chicken, tofu and veg. Cosy home lunches yayy

Might grill myself a steak tonight though, need something unhealthy in my life

Hi, just got caught up with this. Honestly, no worries at all. Experiments are welcome and mistakes will happen! Not everything will work and that's fine. Heck, this whole project is an experiment. Thanks for being transparent about your thought process and taking ownership of things. I thought it might be good to address your points anyway, for you and other future readers:

1. Hogging: I initially had this concern too, but I'm starting to feel this may be fine in practice. There's many ways to name most things, e.g. r/trees on reddit. Plus we're small; if someone gets silly and tries to namesquat, we can always just reach in and undo this, or reclaim unused subs. Let's see how this goes.

2. "Barons": Yep there's circles of people who have hung out for years here. On the daily thread, on the Discord, the mod team, etc. But FYI they're very porous circles. And you mostly "get in" by contributing regularly over time. We're always starved for people willing to chip in care / work / brains / goodwill to build things over long periods. Like @imaginelizard has shared analytics skills on the annual subreddit survey for many years, and bootstrapped the news subs here. But @Naomikho is a new face!

So we really do welcome people stepping up and contributing. That said, we constantly coordinate / compromise / give-and-take to help ensure we pull together, and towards good results for the whole community. E.g. lizzy recently put one plan on hold, in order to flow better with the main sub (thanks again!). One general principle the mod team also uses internally is our "votes" carry less weight if we're not actively contributing, so there's no "landed gentry" here.

3. Diversity: We're still figuring this out but IMO we need to balance two priorities here. Subs are better when they have more members. So it's good if we can try to put more wood behind fewer arrows, i.e. grow a few solid subs as a team sport. But it's also great to have people trying all kinds of stuff and building new things!

Ultimately we all win if our shared house is both lively and pleasant. We haven't got clear answers yet, but after some discussion we're starting to suspect our role as admins will involve some coordination between subs, so that we all play together nicely for the benefit of the whole.

Thanks for sharing your concerns! (And thank you for listening to my TED talk lol)

Open offer: If anyone writes a script that uses this API to do something useful for monyet.cc, and you can pack it up as a cronjob + python file, we'd be happy to host it for you!

Please get it working and stable on your own machine before handing it to us though. Since this is untrusted python code we have to review your script manually, and I don't want to be doing a million little code reviews...

Thanks for asking guise! It's cheap, Lemmy is written to be very resource efficient! Domain is USD10/y, hosting is about USD20/month.

And hosting is actually overprovisioned and could probably be USD5-10/month. I got a slightly bigger VM just in case (2 CPUs, 2GB RAM). But I'm seeing CPU % at 2.5% with just one spike to 10% in the last day. RAM holding steady at 52%.

Zero issues covering costs for this experimental stage btw! We don't know how this will go yet. And things have been good career wise lately. But yeah if we start seeing real traffic and need to pay for big boy servers, we may need to figure out something with the community!

Testing username tagging. @solus@monyet.cc @some_random_meatbag@monyet.cc @unhedged@monyet.cc (garr why doesn't this work!?)

Ohey, first comment ever. Glad it's you. Welcome!!