Why YSK: We have a significant number of users now, and yet the amount of content to scroll through is still fairly small. This is because not all users are the same, and while the majority prefer to lurk, and a much smaller minority prefer to comment, the percentage that really likes making posts, memes, art, rants, videos etc is extremely small.
One way that we can all assist with this is to simply make content ourselves. But even if you don’t want to do that, you can still help by finding productive creators elsewhere on the internet and telling them about us.
Many reddit users are still simply unaware that we exist. They don’t know that there is a community of consumers here, waiting for content. They don’t know that if you can navigate reddit, then you can navigate this. Lemmy is just not as complicated as it can sound at first.
So, if you want, simply invite them. Give them a link to a community down here that would fit the content they like to produce, and let them know we’d love to have them. Because we really would love to have them. Let them know that you, as a fan, would love to see them here. After all, wouldn’t you?
Thanks for reading.
I would like to make a distinction between a “content creator” in the literal sense — just a person who creates content — and a “content creator” as the phrase is commonly used today — a person who makes a living by selling content or by giving away content to market something else.
I, for one, would be very interested in seeing more people on the fediverse creating content, but I’m not super interested in the fediverse becoming a marketing channel for professional content creators.
Of course, it’s an open platform, so pro content creators are more than welcome to join. I’m just not super excited about approaching them and saying, “please come hock your wares to us on the fediverse!”
I agree, this is a useful distinction. Though it should be up to individual groups of moderators on how much promotion they are willing to tolerate.
Obviously a forum dedicated to OnlyFans girls would be all professionals, and doesn’t really count imo.
I was thinking more in the first sense, of just “people that make content”. Though it does happen that these people evolve into semi-professionals as their skills and reach improves, and where to draw that line is tricky. Patreon supported creators, for instance? Professionals certainly, but they’re producing their stuff anyway. They may as well share it here too, once it is finished.
That’s different from someone hosing the place down with cheap AI art or something, hoping they drum up commissions.
I feel weird about pushing my content for profit. Granted my “content” is just writing, and I just post it, no strings attached, but it’s not the sort of stuff that is easily “digestible” by most people ime. But it’s all I can really do to support the platform and try to give something somewhat useful to people. I don’t know how else to contribute but by doing the thing I like to do. I suck at memes.
Also, take rhe tine to scroll through the community and magazine lists, and subscribe to a shit ton of them. I dont run out of content to scroll through at all. Thats saying some for me: Im currently in a shit situation that’s out of my control for now, and have had metric tonnes of time to spend on Lemmy. Fortunately, my subscription list is enormous, and keeps me occupied just fine .
If I’m not mistaken this improves your whole Lemmy as well. Since the instances do not batch with each other until some random-ass user asks them to. I think anyway. I still need to do more reading on this…
Something something if a user is subscribed to a community on another instance only then will it cross populate or something like that?
Adding to that: there is no need to go into detail about the fediverse and how it connects to other instances and mastodon and all that.
For a newcomer, the most important thing is to get their feet wet. Introduce them to ONE instance. kbin.social and lemmy.world are my favorites to introduce to people because it’s relatively easy to signup and there is a decent amount of content/activity.
Once they’re comfortable poking around, that’s when you start talking about instances.
If you start off by telling them to pick an instance, their eyes are going to glaze over. Pick one for them. If they really prefer another instance, great, they can create a new account when they feel strongly enough about it themselves.
I’m pretty tech and understand how federation works, but the analysis paralysis of picking a server still made me decide against making an account when I first looked into Lemmy. I strongly agree - just send them to a single sign-up page, (mostly) doesn’t matter which. There isn’t even karma, so if they decide they want to be on another server once they’re familiar there isn’t much to lose.
I agree wholeheartedly.
Personally I think lemmy.world makes an excellent landing/containment Instance, but I can see a case for it not being appropriate for all. We’re basically just creating reddit here. If reddit bothered you too much, you may as well just defederate us now. It would be appropriate.
It’s interesting to see people talking about bots flooding some communities with content and others saying there’s not enough.
I created a bot, not to bring posts and comments from reddit but to use reddit as content curator, to bring links that were engaging there on to here.
However some people think theres a difference between users making a post with just a link to a news article or a bot doing it.
I think there’s a use for bots, when the content they bring is external to both reddit and lemmy, and discussion around it is organic.I can see both sides of this, and I’m honestly not sure which I’m on. To use the World News bot as an example, I am glad it’s there. I can hang out in here and stay up-to-date on the news without having to leave because of it, which I appreciate. But the flip side is I will not myself make a post in that forum, because the bot will just flood me out.
Eventually there will be enough of us that people start posting there more, anyway. But until then the bot probably does serve to discourage some posting participation.
Pros and cons. I like the news bot for sure, but I can see bots being problematic in certain kinds of communities. It’ll just depend on the local culture.
And speaking of culture, don’t forget everyone here has some kind of early adopter personality trait. That’s not representative of the public at large, it’ll be a heavily skewed sample that leans younger, at first.
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I see the tldr bot in that community… but not other bots?
In the context of professional content creators, they make money from their content.
Maybe a for-profit fediverse instance will be able to pay them and make it work.
Or maybe they can share their content both here and on paid social media, as a kind of donation to the whole.
Actually, I’m kinda satisfied with the fact that the fediverse isn’t commercialized and monitized (yet?). The content isn’t addicting, you don’t get hits of dopamine when watching the content here, it feels like the good old forum days, an adventure.
Anyway, I agree that more quality content will lead to more engagement in the community, thanks for sharing and the heads-up.
I’m very satisfied as well. It feels like a small group of people just hanging out and the negativity is almost nonexistent - in my experience so far. I feel like with a mass of people like Reddit that the negativity kinda bubbles to the top.
I feel like my brain is detoxing since coming here. In the literal and figurative sense.
- Addiction - I’d degenerated to just doom-scrolling reddit and rarely commenting cos the top 3 comments were unfunny puns with 12,000 others so it never felt worth it.
- Regaining Self - I’d become so outwardly sanitised I didn’t realise I’d stopped swearing entirely in my older comments. I used to pepper my comments with fuck, bitch, shit, cunt as I do in the real woirld. But with heavy penalties against words like “faggot” (which is fucking idiotic for Brits) I’d started to self-censor to the point I wasn’t being “me”.
I’m not saying I hope it turns into 4chan.
But I do hope it grows into the early days of Reddit. Where people only downvoted things they found useless rather than disagreeable. There were less self-made echo chambers with ultra-sanitised ‘drone-like’ users where everyone had the same unfunny opinion.
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I thought I was helping by interacting with a bunch of posts with no replies and then I realized that all of them were posted by bots ripped from Reddit and nobody was ever going to see my replies and I got really annoyed with myself.
What Instance were you in?
I don’t know? I was responding to a bunch of lemmit reposts in AITA.
