Fedigrow

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To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks

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submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
 

Why consolidate communities?

One of the advantages of a decentralized platform like Lemmy is the ability to create parallel communities on the same topic. "You don't like how a community is being moderated? Go to another instance and start your own community!" (with or without blackjack and hookers)

However, this is a double-edged sword. The creation of multiple communities on the same (or similar) topics can also fragment the userbase, leading to very sparsely populated communities.

A few perspectives in favour of consolidation: (click to expand)https://sh.itjust.works/comment/11171955

I think until there’s some tool or system that helps collate all the information out here, fragmentation is detrimental to growth.

I’m not going to copy and paste the same comment with every mirrored post.

So sometimes commenting feels like a waste of time.

Centralizing helps ensure that there’s vibrant, consistent discussion which is what Lemmy should be about.

https://lemmy.ca/comment/8823953

I like this because people showing up to those communities might think that topic doesn’t have activity on Lemmy, when it actually does.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/8370860

I sometimes think that unmoderated communities should be closed, and just be left and locked with a pointer to the active one. In case an issue arises with the active one, they can still be unlocked and used as back up.

Credits to @[email protected], @[email protected], and @[email protected]

How consolidate communities?

While consolidating communities can counteract userbase fragmentation, it is not an easy process for users to do, and so I thought I'd write up and share this guide.

Taking inspiration from @[email protected]'s excellent blogpost, let's imagine a hypothetical scenario where the pancake userbase on Lemmy is heavily fragmented, could benefit from consolidation.

Step 1: Identify duplicates

Search lemmyverse.net/communities for 'pancakes', as well as common synonyms (hotcake, griddlecake, flapjack). In our hypothetical scenario, we get the following search results:

Open each community on its home instance, note the frequency of posts, and check whether the moderators are active. From this, you will often get a hunch for what might be the best community to consolidate to, but you should still keep an open mind as you proceed to the next step.

Edit1: To avoid centralization on large instances, I typically prefer consolidating towards smaller instances, provided that they are well managed.

Step 2: Solicit input

Create a post on [email protected]. The post should contain the following:

  1. A brief reminder on the detriments of userbase fragmentation and the advantages of consolidation.
  2. The list of duplicate communities you've identified for a given topic.
  3. An invitation for discussion and, optionally, your recommendation of a community to consolidate to.

Example post here (electric vehicles).

Once you have posted, create a top-level comment for each community in which you reach out to the moderators, administrators, and contributors for their opinions.

Example comments: (click to expand)

Paging [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]) active moderator @[email protected]

Would you be open to consolidating this community with one on another instance, perhaps [[email protected]](/c/[email protected])?

Also paging active contributor @[email protected] for their thoughts.


[[email protected]](/c/[email protected]) moderator @[email protected] is inactive.

Paging admin @[email protected]. Would you be open to consolidating this community with one on another instance, perhaps [[email protected]](/c/[email protected])?


Paging [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]) moderator @[email protected]

How would you feel about a potential influx of posters and commenters from other instances? Would you be open to adding additional moderators, perhaps those who were active contributors or moderators in pancake communities on other instances?

These comments will hopefully spark discussion among the pancake enthusiasts on Lemmy.

Edit2: There will often be users advocating for consolidation to whichever community currently has the most subscribers/activity. When this community is on of the larger instances, feel free to gently remind people of the risks of centralization.

If any two communities agree to consolidate, you can move onto step 3.

Step 3: Consolidate communities

When a decision is reached between any two communities, one community can then be closed, and redirect users to the other. You should recommend that the moderator take the following actions:

Example comment: (click to expand)

Would you be able to do the following?

  1. Lock [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]) by checking "Only moderators can post to this community"
  2. Create one final post on [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]) announcing the consolidation to [[email protected]](/c/[email protected])
  3. Rename the community to "[Dormant] moved to [[email protected]](/c/[email protected])"

Changing the community display name is particularly helpful for users when they are searching for communities.

When to NOT consolidate communities?

If there exist two active communities on the same topic, and they have a different significant difference in geographical focus, political leanings, or moderation style, these communities should not be consolidated. This would be an example of the advantages of parallel communities in the Fediverse.

TL;DR:

  • Find all the communities on a given topic (easy)
  • Convince people that consolidation is a good idea (medium)
  • Get people, many of whom may be reluctant to see a community on their home instance locked, to decide on a which community to switch to (challenging)
  • Contact the moderators (or the admins, if the mods are inactive) of each of the n-1 communities and get them to lock each community, with appropriate links to the decided upon community (simple, but tedious)

It can be a bit of a pain-in-the-ass to do properly, and I've seen many more failures than successes, but given the potential benefit for the Fediverse as a whole, I thought I'd write up and share this guide. Feedback is welcome :)

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submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
 

Most instances have a community where users can request the moderator role for inactive or unmoderated communities.

As each instance names these slightly differently, I thought I'd create a thread to collect as many as possible.

Please comment below with equivalent communities and I'll add them to the list.

Note: When requesting the moderator role for a community, it is best to do so from a local account (same instance as the community) rather than a remote account. Many people (myself included) have encountered federation issues with some moderation actions when using a remote account.

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It seems https://lemmy-federate.com/ is just wildly popular with people suggesting it and eagerly biting on the suggestion they were given. It seems to just completely subvert the intention of not wasting any storage or space or even energy by federating out communities others did not ask for, or federating in communities nobody on the instance subscribes to, by having bots on instances follow communities. So my understanding is that even if nobody on example.instance cares about [email protected], example.instance still wastes resources on federating it in if someone submitted it here.

I do see that

If you want to add your instance to the list, you can login from top right. If you are a user, you can ask your instance admin to add your instance.

on this page. And I have heard of instances opting out from this. So I am curious: if your instance does not participate, what does that mean? No bots subscribing to communities on your instance so they go to everyone else? How does it work? I looked at https://lemy.lol/c/[email protected] and https://lemmy-federate.com/ and https://github.com/ismailkarsli/lemmy-federate and did not see an explanation. On the list of instances on lemmy federate almost everyone seems to be enabled. So I'm curious how it works. Half of me thinks this chips away at the whole point of decentralization, just making sure every instance federates tons of stuff in regardless of actual user interest on the instance. The other half says people can do what they want with their instance, maybe I just do not understand how it works and it does not cause the problems I think it does, even if I'm right maybe most Lemmy users want it, and that it doesn't actually impact my life unless I decide to start being an instance host myself (and in that case then I would really need to know how it works, to figure out how my own instance would behave with lemmy-federate and what restrictions I could place on it).

Please let me know if my understanding is wrong, and how it actually works if so, because I have actually tried the provided resources by the lemmy-federate project to understand before coming here and sharing my understanding and disapproval of how it works if it works the way I think it does.

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submitted 57 minutes ago* (last edited 54 minutes ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
 

Pictured in the thumbnail is an 'Over The Top Chilli' in its latter stages, an indirect cook, also here:

We also just slap meat on the grill:

but it's not just about meat. Veggies on the grill rule too:

If you or anyone you love deeply, with all your tastebuds, likes to cook over fire then come and join us. We are a small, but welcoming community for people who love to cook over a live flame.

HT to @[email protected] for pointing me here!

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Back with newsgroups the general rule was to go from general to specific. You start with a general discussion group and when discussions about video games get annoying you create a games group. If then there are too many Baldur’s Gate discussions you create BG. If they are dominated by Baldur’s Gate 3 you create a Baldur’s Gate 3 group. If everyone is fawning over Withers you create a Withers group which of course will be flooded with discussion about the Withers’ tits mod, which shall get its own group.

Meaning you should create a group when demand is there and not the other way around.

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I want to pitch someone to do some posts in [email protected]

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submitted 11 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
 

We currently have quite a few:

Dead instances

Do each of these communities serve a distinct purpose? If not, should we consolidate some of them?

I think the ManderXYZ instance is a nice match for the topic, but I am interested to hear what others think.

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Just a thought: But I was reading this thread, and although I had thought of it before - it came back to me again. Seems to me that Lemmy, even a particular instance, could work on a sort of "Categorisation System" function whereby communities would be categorised under certain tags so new users (and anyone really) could filter for communities they have interest in. So you would filter by, for instance: Conversational, Memes, News, Politics, Movies, Gaming, Technology etc. Some communities could have multiple tags. It would even be cool if you could exclude certain tags too. So someone might want to see "News" but not "Politics" and filter for communities focused on news, but without any political focus. There could even be subcategories too, so: "Conservational" would have specific types of discussion underneath it: "Debate", "Casual" etc.

You could then order by activity, subscribers, creation date - much like you can now on here.

I realise there have been some attempts at this, like: [email protected], but it seems abandoned (and incomplete) and too much work and too awkward to somehow represent in a particular community.

I also think that if such a system was to exist, it would have to somehow be moderated by others as any community mod could poorly or deliberately categorise their community badly. Something on a larger scale to Piefeds system.

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Is it a PTB move ([email protected]) to ban a user if their only activity in a community is downvoting posts?

The behaviour baffles me a bit. If they dislike the majority of the posts in a community, why are they subscribed? Or if they are browsing by /all, why have they not blocked the community? Are they under the mistaken impression that Lemmy has an algorithm which uses downvotes as an indicator for "show me less of this"?

Has anyone else encountered a "serial downvoter" in any of their communities?

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The instances being used are

  • lemmy.doesnotexist.club
  • chinese.lol

Here is an example of the coordinated downvoting https://hackertalks.com/post/8692093

Of course its a controversial user who got someone angry enough to automated downvoting @[email protected]

But you can see every post they make gets 53ish downvotes from these two instances, plus some organic ones after a few hours.

Current downvoting Accounts

bot-list

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

A individual user airing their personal biases and manipulating lemmy isn't good for the community, regardless of how you feel about their target. This is a really bad thing (tm)

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I've noticed occasionally well-meaning people trying to start communities, or move them to new instances, promptly filling the void in what I'd call "linkdumping". This is when someone creates a bunch of link posts to a variety of articles, sometimes from a single site, but often from a few, all related to the community's topic/focus. At a glance it's similar to spam, but I think it's sort of wrong to label it as such, as on further inspection you can tell that the intent is different.

Unfortunately linkdumping tends to overlook the impact this has on the community's appearance to casual browsers, and how they'll be able to maintain visibility after the initial spate of posts. Instead whenever possible I think people considering creating new communities should be encouraged to pace their posts throughout the day/week/etc.

That's a little much to do manually, so that's where pointing them to Lemmy Schedule, if the community is on a Lemmy site anyway, can help.

At the same time, it may be worth requesting that Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed devs consider adding post scheduling features for admins/moderators in some capacity. This would help those trying to build communities provide them with regular activity without having to do so manually and get burnt out.

But what do you think?

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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
 

[email protected] is under new management. It's a really positive and interesting group of posters with an interest in witchcraft, supporting women and feminism. It's picking up redfugees and definitely worth checking out.

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submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
 

There are two fairly active communities with almost identical topics:

The community on ml is named "crows" but its scope includes "crows, ravens, and other corvids".

Taking into account the community names, overlapping topics, instance size, and other issues with ml, might we consider consolidating towards sopuli.xyz?

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https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/bdid38k9p0t1cf/federation-health-single-instance-overview?orgId=1&var-instance=lemmy.world&var-remote_instance=aussie.zone

Parallel sending of federated activities to other instances. This can be especially useful for instances on the other side of the world, where latency introduces serious bottlenecks when only sending one activity at a time. A few instances have already been using intermediate software to batch activities together, which is not standard ActivityPub behavior, but it allows them to eliminate most of the delays introduced by latency. This mostly affects instances in Australia and New Zealand, but we’ve also seen federation delays with instances in US from time to time. This will likely not be enabled immediately after the upgrade, but we’re planning to enable this shortly after.

https://lemmy.world/post/23471887

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Community is [email protected]

Sidebar description is:

A community dedicated to documenting and debunking fallacious arguments and misleading claims found on 4chan. Whether it’s cherry-picked statistics, misleading comparisons, or outright fabrication, we shine a light on the worst logic the imageboard has to offer. Share screenshots, analyze arguments, and discuss where they go wrong. Whether it’s science denial, historical revisionism, or bad math, let’s break it down!

Could it be disproved with 5 seconds of research? Then it will fit in perfectly here!

Anyway I think it's criminally under-subscribed, so maybe check it out :)

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Following up on this thread: https://lemm.ee/post/58774156?scrollToComments=true , which was used to announce people that we were moving (similar to https://lemmy.world/post/24312613)

General feedback was negative.

Lessons learned: find a way to notify only subscribers

An admin told me that if this kind of action os coordinated with the community instance admins, they could consider sending a mass direct message, which could then also target only subscribers.

This would require direct database access.

For context, the previous experience was https://lemmy.world/post/24312613

Feedback there was

thanks, I’m sure I only shitposted one time here about football’s cultural atmosphere or game theory/sportsmanship in general.

Thank you for the heads up folks

As a lemm.ee user myself, I approve of this.

I saw the automod tag everybody, and that’s a really nice solution you’ve come up with

I’m also not subscribing to the new one b/c I’m starting to get annoyed with the notion that communities need to be consolidated. That’s not a discussion for this post, though.

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cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/9451996

Thoughts on features to boost intent for posting more?

Like a karma system of that other forum website.

I currently miss a point system to motivate me that shows people via my profile how much I could help by posting/commenting. There's no system to create such feedback currently on Lemmy.

Are there statements by the creators of this platform about that?

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submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
 

⚠️ Disclaimer: These are just some of the "imaginary" communities on Lemmy; You can find more using this link or the search bar. (Also, post below)⚠️

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

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This is the second time I have been hit with what is essentially "no you can't promote a Lemmy community here, that is against our self-promotion rules." (First was r/otomegames mods not wanting to help with a Fedi otome community or even letting me advertise outside of a Self-Promotion Sunday weekly post nobody looks at. [email protected] for the curious. This incident is for promoting [email protected], and it feels especially bad because the official, non-Fedi community has official presence on freaking TikTok and posts partnered creators on Discord with Twitch streams and the like, but I can't show a little Reddit alternative for people who want to move off of it. Guess I'd have to start streaming and post exclusively to Fedi or something to get up. Pisses me off.)

possibly non-productive frustrationI get it, I really do. Self-promotion restriction helps prevent a community from being flooded with spam of people trying to get your eyeballs to look at THEIR super unique and totally different from the millions of others out there, I promise stream, or YouTube channel, or whatever is the latest hot thing that people will spam you about. On another hand though, it also makes it much harder to drag people out of a big corporate platform where outrage is algorithmically boosted to maximize engagement, and over to here where outrage is not given an unfair boost and it's a lot easier to just look at new posts and close the site for the day. And I recognize it's a bit hypocritical of me to use streamers as an example, because everyone, including me here, thinks they are just the little guy trying to get eyeballs onto something relevant to that community—I think my case is special too, because of blah blah FOSS good and blah blah not trying to get you to buy or make a parasocial relationship with me, but others probably have their own arguments too that have to be unilaterally shut down to prevent everyone clamoring for exceptions and opening the gates to self-promotion hell with no actual discussion of the topic the community is supposed to be about.

It's just really, really frustrating. I can't siphon people off the big corporate platforms because rules against it, so I have to sometimes use that big corporate platform myself to find content for here or to talk about the topic—because nobody's here to talk, because I can't promote it somewhere with lots of people, because those are the big corporate platforms that won't let me advertise. To be fair, I can't advertise in general, but it still feels shitty and anticompetitive, even if the rule's genuine intention was not about forestalling competition and more about not getting overrun by LOOK AT MY ART/STREAM/PLAYTHROUGH/REVIEW.

Have any Lemmy communities here grown without help from mods on a bigger site? (I know the Datahoarder community moved with the official help of r/datahoarder mods, good on them, I'm curious about communities who didn't get that kind of support.) How did they do it?

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