this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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Fedigrow
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To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
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Well, I don't know if "niche" is the best term, but I'm still pretty alone posting on
I also started two others recently
Part of the problem is the smaller instances don't even see those communities when you post, I was unaware of 75% of the communities you just listed. I have a micro instance, and if I don't subscribe I don't see it.
It's probably not much of an issue, given that most people are on a couple mega instances...
Hey, nice to see you here!
I know community discoverability can be an issue. When I launched [email protected] and [email protected], I used my alts on the top 10 instances to subscribe to them so that they would show in the All feed of those instances.
For small instances, I tried to post too to [email protected] and [email protected], but beyond that there isn't really much I can do.
There was a tool that could help address that (I don't have the name right now), but last time I tried it, it wasn't working, so I'm not sure it's that useful.
Good to be seen! Smart of you to preseed The larger instances good strategy
I think the clients are going to have to solve this, maybe look at the all feed on multiple servers, and then only show you what's different compared to your own server.
Discoverability is the key weakness of Lemmy, just like mastodon
Not sure clients might be the solution here, I think at the end people will have to choose
Are you familiar with Lemmy Federate? Participating instances get a bot that follows submitted communities to get them in feeds and then unsubscribes once a real user from the instance subs.
Ah, that's the cool I was looking for! Are we sure this tool is completely functional? The large number of "in progress" instances always gives me doubt
It used to be Lemmy Community Boost and I think it still works despite the status. I do keep meaning to track the developer down and give them a nudge.
I do see now that many instances have auto-add turned off, that could be what were seeing.
I'm not sure tbh. Pretty sure it's run by the lemy.lol admin?
The tool relies on community local subscriber count to unsubscribe and that value was not available from 0.19.0 to 0.19.3. I fixed the problem about 8 months ago but due to unfortunate timing, it didn’t reach prod from then.
In the end, the tool is working. The only problem is, it doesn’t know if it should unsubscribe on 0.19.0 to 0.19.3. So it stays in in progress state but still federates the community.
Once all instances upgrades to 0.19.4, it will work correctly both functionally and visually.
@[email protected] @[email protected]
Also @[email protected]; the auto add feature is for adding new local communities to the tool automatically. With it, users don’t need to add their communities manually to the tool because it will do it automatically.
But the federation is not relies on that tick. If the instance is enabled, it will subscribe to all communities no matter if auto add is enabled or not.
I guess I need to improve the explanations cuz at this state it is so confusing :) Maybe a FAQ page could be useful.
Thanks for the information - very useful. And yes, an FAQ would be handy, although if you wait long enough it'll be less necessary.
Thank you for the update! Maybe you should make a dedicated thread with that info here, in [email protected] ?
It's a nice tool BTW, thanks !
I was waiting for majority of the instances to upgrade to 0.19.4. I will make some changes in the tool too.
Yuri welcome 🙏
Sounds good, thanks!
I see, I thought it meant the manually added communities were put into a queue of some sort and each instance admin would manually choose when they get added. I'm glad that's not the case. Thank you for clarifying and for the wonderful tool.
The second scenario is viable, if Lemmy was a lot more vibrant, and had enough population that the niche communities could keep you busy. Right now I wake up and check Lemmy and I've gotten through all the new posts in 20 minutes. So it's getting kind of quiet
It is indeed quiet.
I wanted to try something and blocked all news/memes/tech/politics communities last week, my All feed is definitely much more quieter.
Which I don't mind, but there is definitely stuff to do to get it the communities "beyond memes-tech-news" active
Checking [email protected] can be useful sometimes
Yeah you pretty much have to use https://lemmyverse.net/communities
There's a feature request here that would help https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2951
I remember this one, doesn't seem to get much traction unfortunately 😔
That's a really good feature! I hope it gets implemented
For Voyager, I already suggested that they highlight communities for subscribe to when they are displayed, and that would make it easier to subscribe to new communities, so you don't have to check to see if you've already subscribed
Consider participating in lemmy-federate.com/ ? That should help.
Dragged Dragonball over to my instance.
Thanks!
@[email protected] can you create [email protected] so we can try and transition that community over to there blaze is doing amazing work in terms of making it feel active, but I'm all about decentralization. I also think @[email protected] and @[email protected] would both be great as part of the moderation team.
I do own lemmy.futbol if someone would want to co create an instance, but frankly I do not have a lot of free time so I could only help out in a supporting capacity
To be honest as mentioned elsewhere I'm not the most convinced about having all of the theme instances managed by rglullis.
Raphael, don't get me wrong, you are doing a very good job, and I really hope you'll succeed with your new NLNet grant, but having all of those instances depending on you, even if you seem to have a backup person, seems risky.
@[email protected], also the Euro 2024 is starting later this week, I think it's just too late to migrate now if we want a decent level of activity during the event. We can always revisit later, but I wouldn't move now.
It feels a bit of a Catch-22, doesn't it?
The first topic-based I started was selfhosted. Not by choice, but because the mods of /r/selfhosted refused to run their own instance and instead went to LW. The others have similar stories. There are also instances that I went as far as setting up the domain name and creating the first communities (roll20), but shutting them down after I noticed that there was already some other instance (ttrpg) filling a similar need.
I'll gladly get the instances out of my back, if they grow to the point that enough people are using it and willing to moderate it. But they are never going to grow if key members in the network keep rejecting it on the grounds of "I don't trust it", will it?
Aside from the differences that Communick is a commercial venture while the "larger" instances are "begware", I honestly don't know what is that I am asking that makes people reject it so vehemently.
I agree with most of what you are saying.
I guess in this case programming.dev is a solid choice enough for a !linux community, in the same vein as ttrpg.network was for DnD and RPG.
@[email protected] what do you think?
On a completely different level, I would gladly give a few communities back to other people. I guess there are only so many people having time and energy to keep the whole thing alive, and we are all stretched a bit too thin.
Instance management is a much more important commitment than moderation, though.
It's important but it isn't a huge amount of work, especially if you have a good team to spread the load.
It also helps that I am running a managed instance hosting business, and I should be more comfortable doing this than the average hobbyist?
Yes, I'd imagine there are efficiencies to doing that - we inherited a thriving medium-sized instance so, despite one of the team having spun up their own Lemmy instance, there was a lot of "learning on the job" required to get everything humming along nicely. I imagine that, with more experience it becomes easier.
On the other hand, having a lot of instances managed by you increase the impact in case something happens
Then can we do it with one, maybe?
I guess we could. For soccer.forum, as I said, it's too close to the Euro for a migration, we can maybe revisit later?
But actually I just remembered there was https://fanaticus.social/
Do you want any more commitment than a business running 10+ instances for almost a year now? Paying $1000+ per year on the domains alone?
Forgive my bluntness, but it seems that the fact that Communick is (or tries to be) a for-profit venture bothers you?
That's what I mean. You have higher costs as you manage 10+ instances. Could those costs lead you to stop the project at some point? I know you don't like begware, but that's another model that can also work (most of the instances have celebrated their first birthday recently)
No worries. Actually it's not really the business model that concerns me (I'm neutral), but the centralization of instances managed by one entity.
If anything happened to the most popular 10 instances, Lemmy would probably die overnight.
Having one instance down, even for weeks (LW last year) still allowed other instances to operate
"Begware" seems so negative - I like to recall the maxim: "If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product." The rise the Big Tech social media firms was propelled by convenience and there being no obvious upfront costs. Enshittification has shown us what the actual costs are.
The Fediverse shows a better way to do it but, if you aren't selling your users data, then someone has to pay. If one person is footing the bill, then that is a single point of failure. Luckily, costs are quite low, so it doesn't need a lot of people to chip in to cover the costs - I will.admit to being concerned when we launched the feddit.uk fundraiser, as I wasn't sure how much we'd raise but, within a couple of days we'd got almost enough to cover the year's costs with a good steady stream of donations. It means the instance's financial future is secure.
The costs of running the instances is sunk already, because I run them on the same infra that I use for my projects, and it's not a couple of hundred dollars per month that is going to make or break things for me. The worst case scenario is "I go back to a full-time job and Communick becomes yet-again a side-project/hobby". The case where any of these instances become big enough to the point that it demands more from me is better than any of the current situation.
I honestly don't see it this way. Activity through the network has been abysmal. Operating an instance at this level should be incredibly easy, but even then we have things like bigger instances having issues with lack of moderators, basic federation issues between the larger instances mostly because of network latency... all that show that we should be collectively putting a lot more resources into this if we truly want to have a credible alternative to Reddit and Facebook Groups.
I don't want to sound too pessimistic, but Lemmy feels pretty much dead already. My feed is mostly content from the communities that I've been posting + the two of three stubborn users (like yo)u who have been trying as hard as possible to make something out of it.
The Linux thing is already done. I was just saying I would've preferred a less "Linux is only for programmers" style home. But for Dungeons and Dragons, Table Top Role Playing Game Network is the epitome of perfection in a home.
You're not wrong in the slightest.
Glad to see we agree!
You really dislike "main", huh?
There is also [email protected], if you prefer.
Hate it. It needs a football 😏
I was thinking of breaking main into !news, !highlights and !talk. Football@soccer seems a bit redundant (and schizophrenic in terminology)
Trust me, just create football. Remember, very few people on this planet call it soccer
@[email protected]