Marketing can be done by anyone. :) All it takes is a little passion and excitement when telling someone else about something you enjoy.
Professional marketers can bring lots of skills to the table but nothing beats a good old fashioned testimonial.
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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Distribution is a skill though. Testimonials are great but they're limited by how many people see it.
Yes. I don't think Reddit needed marketing in its early days. It was mostly spread by people with their content.
That's why I say the best way to promote Lemmy is just to post links of interesting content.
I'm more of a tech person than a people person. I've been doing as you suggest (for a different open source project) for years, and have been brutally unpersuasive. I do bring a lot of passion and excitement, and that's why they don't tell me to fuck right off. Even my best friends have only listened to enough advice to get themselves into trouble.
I hope it's made a difference. But a professional marketer would certainly have done a better job.
I think better UI by default would be much more important. Right now the biggest issue is probably that people look at lemmy and find it intimidating due to its messy UI.
No. It not the UI. It is the pick a "Feterated Instance" stuff before you even know what it is. No one knows those words. It should just work for new users. Instances and federation should be presented later.
There should be a simple signup that looks something like:
[choose a username] @ [choose an instance]
Where the first one is an input field and the second one is a drop down or search bar. People can pick whatever instance name piques their fancy to get started. Once they understand the fediverse better they can move to another server (hopefully migration will be built-in at some point).
There should be a button that just takes you to the front page of a random instance chosen from a list of instances that are known to generally all be federated with each other. Not everyone wants to bother making account before even seeing the actual website.
Thats part of why almost everyone joins lemmy.world. Easy rec.
That's what I did. Then lemmy.world got slow, I found a small nearby server with great local content, moved there (took days to subscribe the groups again). Then the server went offline, now back to lemmy.world, and I have no idea if the server will be ever back again.
That's what I did. Then lemmy.world got slow, I found a small nearby server with great local content, moved there (took days to subscribe the groups again). Then the server went offline, now back to lemmy.world, and I have no idea if the server will be ever back again.
I think better communication about what federation is would help. I keep seeing folks say it's like email, but that assumes the average person understands how email works.
We should start describing it as "like if Reddit, Digg, and Hacker News could see and comment on each other's content"
Intimidating? I think it's simple enough and got used to it quickly after I switched to Reddit.
https://old.lemmy.world is an awesome recently-pushed feature btw
The nostalgia of early Reddit...
Now I'm intrigued to make account in lemmy.world.
You can use mlmym.org with any instance
Neat!
I also agree, accessibility is a key for new users
What kind of people love to market? And are they just walking around in public, unsupervised?
They exist, but they're not interested in FOSS, only in working for some hot tech startup.
"Listen bro, I have this new idea, bro"
So then we just need that first marketing person to market marketing Lemmy to the marketers.
Yeah. Developers are the only ones willing to work for free
Not even marketers love to market.
Sounds like you snorted heroine before you posted this.
I know there are well meaning marketing people out there, but marketing departments, managers, investors, HR crap, and the rest of the corporate parade are exactly what most open source devs want to avoid by working in OSS projects
Not exactly. A well functioning marketing that needs minimal input and does something out of “fun” or interest is cool. But an annoying freaking Karen working as “marketing associate” cause papa owns the company that literally annoys you ever freaking day making your timeline miserable is something else.
Why do you think open source projects don't like marketing? Open source projects definitely are not opposed to investors (in the form of Donations) or marketing. I market for my favorite linux applications everytime I mention the project or talk about it with my friends. I don't think a Foss dev would be upset that someone marketed their application. Their only goal is to create good software for people to use.
The difference here is that it's not marketing intended to deceive and make money, it's just happy consumers that want to help the project and make it known.
Corporate marketing people though are paid to abuse psychological vulnerabilities of the target audience, over-exaggerate the pros of the software and hide the weaknesses under the carpet. I'm not saying that it's an inherently evil job or that they're not needed in a business, I'm just saying that as a developer I'm tired of software being a product and a business, when I simply want to create good software that solves some kind of problem and not be a cog in some corporate machine.
Stop it, get some help
The issue with large scale marketing is that it can be rather expensive.
Anyone can learn to code and contribute to Lemmy's codebase, just like anyone can learn marketing. The difference is that it's not so easy to, say, buy ad-space, get deals with content creators, etc.
Lemmy's design, however, can be done by web designers, and it is done by web designers/designers, in part at least. For example, Lemmy.world's icon was made by a regular user. That's part of marketing I think (?).
Just looking at the current number of lemmy.world subscribers (115k) , lemmy is very, very far from where it needs to be for long term success as a real alternative to other social media sites. There are literally hundreds of subreddits on Reddit that have more subscribers than all of lemmy.world, which is the largest instance. So far the only place I've ever seen lemmy mentioned is on Reddit, and even then only in certain subs like r/CenturyClub, which isn't even public. I think the key to getting new suscribers is for people on twitter, instagram and facebook to start mentioning lemmy on a regular basis and using clickable lemmy links in their posts.
BTW subscriber growth is also very important if we want lemmy to have a wide variety of good quality content in the future. Speaking as an active poster, the main reward for me is when a post I've made get lots of upvotes and comments. I'm willing to keep posting to lemmy for now even though most of my posts here get many fewer upvotes and comments compared to Reddit. However, if several months from now the post response is still at the same level, then my motivation to keep contributing content to lemmy will diminish. It's the same reason a community with, say, only 20 subscribers gets few if any quality posts while a community on the same topic with 2,000 subscribers gets many quality posts.
I have been doing this where appropriate, but always run up against people telling me it's too complicated and it'll never work because nobody can understand it. I think usability for the less technically minded people is huge and should be a priority before any widespread adoption will be able to take place.
I love marketing.