Fedigrow

It is actually going well, I realize that simply posting every day is not valuable and creating posts that create engagement is more important than spamming links. I found that the hexbear tactic is the right one, posting threads asking for engagement then having users post follow ups works the most and creates the best experience. Simply having Eeddit clone communities with a bunch of links and no engagement will never meaningfully grow a community, especially when the one doing it stops posting. Lemmy will never grow following the tactics of venture capital and existent social media, we have to develop actual communities of friends. Unfortunately that means sometimes people you think are your friends betray you on a simple disagreement.

My biggest problem is with Lemmy users themselves and their internal politics and drama machines. All drama communities that post pictures of other users to call attention to them are toxic and prevent engagement. If Lemmy wants to grow they need to stop acting like Reddit.

This is real feedback from my users:

"I don't want to make posts online knowing that people outside the community will deliberately read them in bad faith to try create a drama post that causes outside users to make antagonistic comments."

a different user went on to add:

"Recently there was a survey on pronouns and gender identity on hb, and then an anti-misogyny discussion afterwards. It ended up with a cycle of s.j.w and .world users screenshotting comments on hb, creating drama posts, then hb users screenshotting those posts back to hb, etc etc etc. All instances should ban posting content from defederated communities imo, or what is the point of defederation."

This is really problematic for me that people don't want to post because if they say the wrong thing or if it is taken the wrong way we get harassed. I know Lemmy has decided to attack all "tankies" which basically has no definition other than "person I don't like and must harass" now people are too scared to post lest they be on the receiving end of harassment. This is going to really stifle the meaningful growth. As someone who has now been posted about multiple times in these communities it feels really bad and is generally for no purpose. To grow lemmy and to boost engagement and to boost comment engagement this must be addressed. Until it is addressed and large instance owners allow these harassment communities to continue to fester we will never grow into a true large scale social media platform.

The other major problem I'm having are people with large amounts of federated accounts that then wield them to manipulate the votes. Sometimes it is really obvious and I can address but other times it isn't and will only take a computer developer with moderate skills to design some kind of harassment bot to aid in this agenda. Turning off downvotes helps, but even boosting the wrong thing stifles engagement and enjoyment and really needs a long term solution, I'm hoping that some kind of fediverse idP will be established so that we can separate the identities out from the communities and have some basic level of protection against this level of astro turfing.