How can we boost Lemmy membership?

Spasmolytic@lemm.ee to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 470 points –

Since my favorite reddit app came to Lemmy I'm really keen on getting more people into the fediverse to pump up the volume of content around here. Are there any initiatives that we can assist to get folks onboard?

I had my wife join, and she likes it, but laments the slow pace of new material in the communities.

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I actually think Lemmy needs more work before it grows much bigger. The mod tools are really lackluster currently. And that was a big reason people wanted to leave Reddit.

It's tough to sell some of the niche communities without proper spoiler tagging, too. Need something easier to use that works on all platforms.

Proper spoiler tagging is important

I Jerboa uses this format

: : : spoiler Title

Without the spaces between the colons, this is just to show what it looks like.

: : :

::: spoiler Title

This is with the spaces removed

:::

Lemmy in general uses this but a lot of mobile UI's don't have proper implementations (or at least they didn't for a while). I'm not sure if liftoff is still in development but the reason I switched back to Jerboa was because spoiler support was finally added

I completely agree. I'm personally holding off on heavy promotion of this platform until we hit 1.0. If people join too early and are turned off by the lack of polish, they may not come back after it's fixed.

Yes. Besides, there isn't any profit being made, is there? I mean, today, more users just means more cost.

Well in theory, more users do mean more donations.

They need to add paid awards with some split for Lemmy development and the instance. That was the reason people bought into Reddit gold. It was a good faith, fund the platform thing.

Awards would only work for people on your own instance though. Pushing them across instances is difficult. If they're free, they become worthless and defeat the purpose. And passing money between instances is stupidly complicated. I guess you'd have to go to the instance in order to buy the award there. Which gives people an incentive to run their own instance. I'd hope that wouldn't make servers too small. As much as people seem to like the idea of many, many small instances federated, I think the system works best with several large instances than a million small ones.

I guess it's complicated.

today, more users just means more cost

Not if they're setting up their own servers. This kind of horizontal growth is the healthiest way to grow a federated network, and something we can do that centralised platforms can't.

All I want is the ability to block inbox replies when I say something controversial.

That would be nice, but for now you could just mark all as read without reading them.

I have actually found that people don't respond to me at all when I say something they feel is controversial. I get a ton of downvotes and maybe once out of every 5 or so times I get one really persistent person who won't let it go. But that's it.

The mod tools are really lackluster currently. And that was a big reason people wanted to leave Reddit

Fair point. The same was said of Mastodon many moons ago. A lot of people put a lot of time and energy into detailed feature requests, describing the problem to be solved, and exactly how their proposed solution would work.

Given that I've also seen the same complaint about apps in other federated networks like matrix, maybe what's needed is a general solution? A website where experienced mods describe the problems they strike, and how social software developers could help them with mod features.