So one thing I miss about reddit is the idea that I can just find any random topic, and there’s an active sub for that.
Reddits biggest problem is knowing these subreddits exist. I was there over 10 years, and still finding new subs until the end.
Lemmys biggest problem is that these communities DON’T exist, and even if they did, theres no audience to support them. No point in making a niche community if theres 0 posts, and 1 subscribber.
But, I found one small fix. This won’t be the thing that boosts Lemmy to the top. This will be more like the small spark that could lead to a bigger fire. Without more steps, this won’t be the answer. But think of this as one step of many.
So over at [email protected] they have a content bot. I assume it’s just reposting the posts on reddit from a predesignated source.
But, what if we did that all over Lemmy? Start up /c/Archer and repost everything from ArcherFX. I don’t see a place to post Archer stuff to.
Now do this for thousands of different subreddits over here.
Yes, at first the content bot would have 0 posts. But thats where WE come in. We all start posting on these threads, to give them the sense of activity. Activity breeds activity. And soon enough you’ll have enough organic activity that you slowly start reducing these bots roles. But thats years from now.
The problem is this dilutes the comments.
If you have 2 posts and one of them has a comment, people might see that comment and join in on the conversation, also the human OP gets a notification about the comment and is likely to reply. What Lemmy needs is more comments not more posts.
But with bot posts you have 1000 posts and maybe 1 of them has a comment but no one will ever see it, people will see the community has lots of posts but no comments and that isn’t interesting, it’s just a glorified RSS feed at that point.
Communities are supposed to be comprised of people not bots. The Google definition of “community”: