So I am a big fan of the Fediverse, I love the idea of decentralisation and I believe this is how the future of social media should be. But here starts the problem.
All my friends are using Instagram or TikTok or else. I didnt think of that while I also used Instagram, but I think they are highly addicted. Its not possible for them to not use Instagram for at least 1h when we meet up. When I still used Instagram, I was part of the problem. But now that I left it a couple of months ago, I just realised the problem I used to live in.
Addiction is all about realising you are addicted, but I find it very hard to address the problem. I dont want to harm our friendship over social media and I am afraid that when I tell them about their addiction, they will not agree and find it impolite.
So I believe that social media can only survive if the people use it. Its all about user generated content and while the Fediverse is doing better than ever, it still needs more users ASAP.
How can we achieve getting those people on the Fediverse and, more importantly, hold them here, while they slowly get less addicted to social media and see the potential of the Fediverse.
Thank you for reading and for thinking about possible answers. I wrote the whole text by myself, this is not AI generated.
OK, just dug up a list of most popular Reddit subs.
We actually have a lot of places for them already, but the viewership is low so the contributions are low.
look at /r/funny 43k weekly contributors vs our top of funny@sh.itjust.works with 15k subscribers. They throw away 3x more contributions every week than we could even if everyone posted something every week.
we can't solve the posts without the people or we end up in bot hell. But we could probably curate the best stuff they're posting and dupe it here.
We need more niche communities and for them to stay alive. I know when this all started, I tried to field a couple new communities and contribute to a niche gaming community. It was only the mod and me for a coupe months, then it was only me. Zero engagement, and if i posted a useful map or chart from IGN, they just downvoted me. That got old after a couple more months and I abandoned it.
If you look at the content in funny or mildly interesting, The content they're posting over there from their large user base is truly engaging. I hate to see bots, but maybe we could come up with some tooling to make curation borrowing easier?
True. And also true.
I think these are the main two content related barriers for entry that Lemmy faces.
Content duping could be a good idea to build some history for communities here and keep engaging content available on the platform.
Same thing applies for niche communities, if people can't find the things they're looking for they're more likely to leave.
One last thing, I think Lemmy needs better page indexing, maybe even as a site-wide rule to encourage this. Most people run into reddit through online searches or popular posts, no such thing exists for Lemmy.
handing it off to elasticsearch wouldn't be hard, but it would probably be expensive.
it would also be per node :(
could maybe create a federated search engine, everything that federates with it gets indexed. OF course who-so-ever didn't want to federate could not federate and make the whole thing icky