As you probably know from the sidebar this site was started by moderators from the r/futurology subreddit, and some of us moderate both. We initially thought most of the site’s growth would come via Reddit, but it hasn’t happened that way. Our main instance - c/futurology - gets most of its subscribers from elsewhere in the fediverse. Despite several attempts with pinned posts that a few thousand people have read, only 20% of our userbase joined from Reddit.
We don’t want to spam the subreddit user base, but we have access to things like pinned posts and comments to promote this site.
We’d like to grow subscriber numbers for here from Reddit. Any ideas as to how to do this more successfully than we have previously?
Do the admins care if there are automod comments in every thread notifying people about the benefits of open-source, federation, and your community here? If not, that may be one of the better methods.
I remember how you guys were one of the first big subs I saw use automod comments in every thread, instead of one sticky at the top of the sub, because you recognized that most people visit their homepage, not each individual sub.
EDIT: I would include information about how it’s dangerous for a single entity to control so much public information.
There’s 2 issues here.
We want to be very selective with our use of automod & pinned posts/comments. It can easily move to accusations of spam.
We’ve tried emphasizing the open-source, no-tracking aspect before. It doesn’t seem to attract much interest.
Most Redditors are casual users there for content. Only a small minority care about the issues that motivate the fediverse. What we’d like to do is bring some of the large group here; but they will have to be motivated by something else.
We have regular posting here now, often with topics not on the sub-reddit. My hunch is that an approach like - “Like r/futurology? - come to our other site for extra content” - might work better.
Have you discussed how it’s dangerous for a single entity to control so much public information? For example, Youtube now randomly removes comments, including from the channel owner. So it’s impossible to have discussions and share information on Youtube now. Yet moving away is so difficult since they have a huge monopoly + the network effect.
Explaining to people that they should take steps to prevent this from happening on other platforms like Reddit should hopefully motivate some more people.
You may also want to mention that Reddit’s automated systems are faulty, and many people are at risk of losing their accounts and subreddits, and thus years of their work.
I listed my reasoning here https://maximiliankohler.blogspot.com/2023/06/reddit-is-dangerous-humanity-needs-an-alternative.html for why people should be moving away from reddit and other large social media companies.
You could even include examples of how Facebook and Twitter have declined and become problematic. The same principals (enshittification, etc.) put the entire internet at risk.
Yeah, that’s not a bad idea at all. You could create an automod sticky in every thread that says “Many of our content creators moved to our Lemmy instance for X reasons, so feel free to join us there for extra content”.
I wouldn’t put the decentralization aspect of Lemmy in the spotlight as its implementation has signifficant flaws. Lemmy hides posts and comments from users in defederated instances even if they’re posted on communities that would be otherwise visible, and this makes the optimal behavior for visibility be that of creating accounts in every instance you’re posting to.
The previous accounts i’ve used on this instance, [email protected] and [email protected], had far less activity on posts/comments compared to posts/comments made by others at similar times, because the instances they were from were defederated by nearly all lemmy instances over accepting lolicon. This issue was bad enough to be one of the reasons that made them leave Lemmy entirely.