Hi All,

I’ve finally had some time to break down the feedback we received over the two weeks the survey was up, and I’ve tried to pull out the key themes and topics of feedback to work on.

As those who answered the questions will know, it wasn’t a yes/no type survey and so we can’t share the feedback in terms of %s of answers, rather we’ve lifted the themes we’ve seen the most.

A big thank you to those who took the time to complete the survey too, the feedback has been incredibly invaluable and lots of people shared kind words about the instance which was really uplifting to read.

So, based on what you said, these are what we’ll look to change/implement/improve:

• Update the intro post (the one in the home community that is also linked in ZippyBot’s welcome message) to expand on the functionality of Lemmy, merge it with the other welcome post we put up during the reddit wave, and flesh it out with more information. We appreciate federated social media is a change to how most people are used to exploring social media, so the more we can do to support that transition the better.

• Expand ZippyBot’s welcome message to include a little bit more information around personalising the site (setting a username, changing the theme to your liking via the settings tab, etc) as pointed out this information is not immediately clear or accessible, so may be easier presented in the welcome message.

• Changing the way we share information with the community, expanding to include more topics and helping to grow the local communities. We’re thinking we’ll change the server rundowns to 4 weekly, and add more information around the local communities that have been created, the biggest growers etc, to try and support and grow the local communities. We may also look at delivering this information differently, i.e. via a PM instead of pinning posts, but we’ll trial this and ask for feedback when we do this.

• Finally, we won’t make any promises right now, but we’ll look at adding more themes for users to choose from. If you fancy making one yourself, we’ll happily host it.

There was also a lot of feedback regarding expanding and adding more local communities. We hear you, and we agree too, but ultimately the power to create these communities lies in your hands. We will promote and share new communities more as we work on improving our communication methods, and we’re looking at building new mod tools (where we can, using the power of ZippyBot) to support moderators of communities, so if you feel there is a community you want to see that doesn’t exist, please create it and we’ll try to help you build a community there. We’ll expand the suggestions ZippyBot gives with new communities too, to help new mods out with the process.

These are the core themes we picked out, but there was lots of one-off or more complex suggestions and improvements that we’ve taken note of - some are out of our control (user specific instance blocking was suggested a lot which is out of our hands, but the devs have put this into a future version of Lemmy and we’ll announce when this is available!) but we will continue to consider these and where possible work these in to future plans.

Again, thank you to those who took the time to complete the survey. We’ll probably do this again at the 6 month mark. And please bear with us while we get some of these in place, anything with ZippyBot takes a little bit of time as I do a lot of testing before pushing any changes to it :)

If you have any questions please let me know.

Thanks,

Demigodrick