After reading the Lemmy guide more carefully, I think we have way more users than I thought yesterday:
I think the 1.62k users are locally registered users, not federated users! This means we’re actually growing steadily by about 20-30 local registrations a day. (Yesterday we were at 1.6k, day before at 1.57k, etc.)
The 67 users/week is the number of users who have posted or commented within the last week. There are way more users registered, but they’re lurking.
This lines up with r/malaysia! Over there we have 360k subscribers and 6.4m views per month, but popular posts generally get 1k upvotes. So a huge proportion of the sub lurks and never even upvotes.
This gives me hope that we can build this into something that will survive the long haul. We’ve built a nice community together on r/my and it’d suck to lose it if reddit declined.
Interesting. This might be due to each post over at r/my have automod linked to this server, and there’s no news over there. I have a feeling once monday is here we will see a stagnant growth of new user and the active user might drop a bit lower than yesterday, as everything went back to normal. Not helping the retention is Lemmy is such a pita to use sometimes, and right now we’re basically duplicate of r/my, r/msians, r/mhp, and r/mpf combined, so it’s hard to retaining active user for longer than 2 days, since they have larger audience back there.
So is there any direction you want this server to take? As far as i’m concern i’m in for a long haul. Feels like this could be so much more than the direction Reddit is taking.
I know what you mean on the former point. I am concerned about retention too. But I’d say we have achieved a minimum bar of success at this point! If there is a sudden scattering from reddit, we have proven that our community is absolutely capable of setting up shop here. Posters, readers, regulars, everyone.
So we have built the boat! Before reddit there were lots of cosy forums across the internet. In the worst case, we can be one of them. We won’t lose the group we’ve created together.
Re: Direction: I don’t have one clear answer yet, but here is my thinking so far:
There is very strong evidence that Malaysians want a national forum all to themselves – lowyat.net.
I have long felt r/my has limits which prevent it from fully serving in this role. Malaysia has such diverse languages, cultures, religions, activities, everything. It’s hard to fit this into a single subreddit (e.g. we can’t have Chinese discussion)
But while lowyat.net is very impressive, it’s run on a structure / codebase / ideas which are 20 years old (phpbb). The community is shaped and limited by this fact, e.g. they can’t have deeply threaded discussions.
Perhaps this is an opportunity to create a thing which serves a similar role to lowyat, but is much more thoughtful about its impact and role in the Malaysian online ecosystem?
The r/my team seems to have figured out how to create a warm and cosy community, that also serves as a force for good.
Like mediating racism and controversy instead of steering into it, and signal-boosting stuff that benefits the IRL Malaysian community.
E.g. if you do a quick Fermi estimate via our pageview counts, I suspect @[email protected] may literally be the most impactful teacher in Malaysia right now, via her SPM support. Consider the effect of slightly better career and university decisions across each student’s entire lifespan. (And similarly, u/snel may be the most impactful counselor)
Sorry for the wall of text! This was a good exercise to get some thinking on paper. What do you think as well?
I’m wondering what we can do to keep a candle burning over here when the main sub comes back online. Would love to hear ideas.
So far, the best idea I have is that there is content we can offer here which is hard to get on r/my
Chinese / Tamil / Jawi language support is definitely one thing. But I’m not sure what else at this stage.
Maybe we can point people here for specialised content which we’re normally forced to remove, such as job boards, buying and selling, dating, promoting local arts and business…
Hmmmm. Perhaps we should start a discussion post for this meta / strategy stuff somewhere, and put it on the sidebar.
In a way I think we might need to cannibalize the main sub a lil by doing exclusive content here instead like the upcoming election megathread. Big events like this was a big draw and boost to the subscribers count for the past few years. Or perhaps there’s an opportunity to tap into the Malay and Chinese online demographic by doing a similar megathread for those demographics instead. That way this instance is not competing for the same crowd as the main sub.
Yeah, I think doing it in the daily chat thread is kind of random. I’m up for hosting a discussion on any other platform too, whichever is the most convenient.
For r/my, on top of what you mentioned, I think there are some other downsides, and Lemmy can offer much more in those aspects
Only 2 maximum pinned posts, while for here there’s a pinned post for monyet.cc, but each community can also have their own pinned post. I think this would really come in handy, and you don’t need to keep rotating the pinned posts.
On Reddit, everything is bundled together, and you’ll see everything regardless whether it’ll be something you’re interested in. But here you can only subscribe to local communities that you want to see! I kind of dislike the fact that there is no category for subscribed local communities however, since I mainly subscribe to other instances for stuff like news and updates.
Man, i wish i have half your positivity in my life hahaha
Regarding of direction, i agree that what we need is to not reach content parity with r/my. So far what we have here in a week time, it’s all duplication of the reddit site, with the exception of the mandarin sub, courtesy of vin, but since we only have like a handful of people active here, i don’t think we can do much at this point, at least in my limited knowledge of running a community.
So far i feels what we can do here is to be patient a little bit, and let people warm up to these fediverse thing, let the concept cook a bit more in the oven and the politic ease off a bit. To me it’s roughly the same thing as reddit but to them it’s a much complicated way to reddit, a daunting way to entertainment, to say the least. Accessibility is also one big problem right now. Been talking with friend group and most feels like the web ui isn’t intuitive enough compared to the reddit official app, which say quite a lot. We could pull a thousand people but lemmy will push 999 back to reddit, none of which will be our fault. The third party app race is only begun not too long ago, and since we have very small active user count, might as well wait along.
As for the lurker, i feels like it best not to call out for them, they will join the conversation when they feels comfortable to.
But let say in the near future we have a bit more active user per day, then perhaps we can run stuff like ITAP contest, or maybe meetup(or just move reddit meetup hosting to here? That wouldn’t be fair i think). Inktober is near as well, we could run it here in c/pics. Was thinking of secret santa as well, but that’s a bit far off into the future.
I think the main difference of this place is, you can create any community you want, post something, and everyone in this place will see it. Back in reddit you have to run around promoting your niche sub, so it’s quite different here. Whether people will find this as a pulling force it still remain to be seen.
It’s going to be tough doing it. HP did it very well for /r/Malaysians. I believe she did it by organizing events. If this site has the tools similar to reddit, tapping into existing mod team’s experience, there should be a way to continue sustaining life.
Btw, this server is paid? Wondering since we have our own domain name.
Based on my observation from the early days, she just posted and posted and posted and posted for a few months until there’s organic content coming from other redditor, while on the main sub every removed post will be directed to r/msians, which is why some people single her out with their mod hate at that time.
I messaged her a few days ago and she confirmed that’s how she build it from the ground up. She also have alternate advice, which is to run it like a business, but without involving money.
So from the beginning i simply posted and posted and posted while engage with almost everyone in their conversation, hopefully in long terms people will slowly gravitate toward this community because it doesn’t looks dead. Then when there’s sizeable amount of user i plan to run some event which can be crossposted to reddit. My opinion on the other comment are all based on my observation of r/msians and r/msianfood, both build from the ground up using the same method.
Though i must admit running a satellite community is tougher than building a new sub, but i think it’s worth a try.
Great point actually, I’ll speak to hyatt about her experience bootstrapping r/mys. She did that incredibly well. There are definitely some tools we can use here.
Yeah it’s paid - I’m sponsoring this initial period but if this becomes an ongoing thing we’ll probably figure out donations or something, so the community can properly own the server. It’s real cheap though, honestly!
(Also hmmmm there’s definitely something wrong with the active user stats, you’ve just joined recently, it was 67 before, and it’s still 67 now. But I’m going to bed - more replies tomorrow!)
That’s exciting! This place seems to be growing into the biggest & most vibrant Malaysian community on the Fediverse yet (though mstdn.my on mastodon is also fairly happening).
After reading the Lemmy guide more carefully, I think we have way more users than I thought yesterday:
Oh, tagging @[email protected] and @[email protected] since we were talking about this yesterday.
Interesting. This might be due to each post over at r/my have automod linked to this server, and there’s no news over there. I have a feeling once monday is here we will see a stagnant growth of new user and the active user might drop a bit lower than yesterday, as everything went back to normal. Not helping the retention is Lemmy is such a pita to use sometimes, and right now we’re basically duplicate of r/my, r/msians, r/mhp, and r/mpf combined, so it’s hard to retaining active user for longer than 2 days, since they have larger audience back there.
So is there any direction you want this server to take? As far as i’m concern i’m in for a long haul. Feels like this could be so much more than the direction Reddit is taking.
I know what you mean on the former point. I am concerned about retention too. But I’d say we have achieved a minimum bar of success at this point! If there is a sudden scattering from reddit, we have proven that our community is absolutely capable of setting up shop here. Posters, readers, regulars, everyone.
So we have built the boat! Before reddit there were lots of cosy forums across the internet. In the worst case, we can be one of them. We won’t lose the group we’ve created together.
Re: Direction: I don’t have one clear answer yet, but here is my thinking so far:
Sorry for the wall of text! This was a good exercise to get some thinking on paper. What do you think as well?
Also hmm back on retention –
Hmmmm. Perhaps we should start a discussion post for this meta / strategy stuff somewhere, and put it on the sidebar.
In a way I think we might need to cannibalize the main sub a lil by doing exclusive content here instead like the upcoming election megathread. Big events like this was a big draw and boost to the subscribers count for the past few years. Or perhaps there’s an opportunity to tap into the Malay and Chinese online demographic by doing a similar megathread for those demographics instead. That way this instance is not competing for the same crowd as the main sub.
Yeah, I think doing it in the daily chat thread is kind of random. I’m up for hosting a discussion on any other platform too, whichever is the most convenient.
For r/my, on top of what you mentioned, I think there are some other downsides, and Lemmy can offer much more in those aspects
Man, i wish i have half your positivity in my life hahaha
Regarding of direction, i agree that what we need is to not reach content parity with r/my. So far what we have here in a week time, it’s all duplication of the reddit site, with the exception of the mandarin sub, courtesy of vin, but since we only have like a handful of people active here, i don’t think we can do much at this point, at least in my limited knowledge of running a community.
So far i feels what we can do here is to be patient a little bit, and let people warm up to these fediverse thing, let the concept cook a bit more in the oven and the politic ease off a bit. To me it’s roughly the same thing as reddit but to them it’s a much complicated way to reddit, a daunting way to entertainment, to say the least. Accessibility is also one big problem right now. Been talking with friend group and most feels like the web ui isn’t intuitive enough compared to the reddit official app, which say quite a lot. We could pull a thousand people but lemmy will push 999 back to reddit, none of which will be our fault. The third party app race is only begun not too long ago, and since we have very small active user count, might as well wait along.
As for the lurker, i feels like it best not to call out for them, they will join the conversation when they feels comfortable to.
But let say in the near future we have a bit more active user per day, then perhaps we can run stuff like ITAP contest, or maybe meetup(or just move reddit meetup hosting to here? That wouldn’t be fair i think). Inktober is near as well, we could run it here in c/pics. Was thinking of secret santa as well, but that’s a bit far off into the future.
I think the main difference of this place is, you can create any community you want, post something, and everyone in this place will see it. Back in reddit you have to run around promoting your niche sub, so it’s quite different here. Whether people will find this as a pulling force it still remain to be seen.
Ohh and we need a food community for foodie lol.
Okay that’s all i have in my empty mind lol
It’s going to be tough doing it. HP did it very well for /r/Malaysians. I believe she did it by organizing events. If this site has the tools similar to reddit, tapping into existing mod team’s experience, there should be a way to continue sustaining life.
Btw, this server is paid? Wondering since we have our own domain name.
Welcome!
Based on my observation from the early days, she just posted and posted and posted and posted for a few months until there’s organic content coming from other redditor, while on the main sub every removed post will be directed to r/msians, which is why some people single her out with their mod hate at that time.
I messaged her a few days ago and she confirmed that’s how she build it from the ground up. She also have alternate advice, which is to run it like a business, but without involving money.
So from the beginning i simply posted and posted and posted while engage with almost everyone in their conversation, hopefully in long terms people will slowly gravitate toward this community because it doesn’t looks dead. Then when there’s sizeable amount of user i plan to run some event which can be crossposted to reddit. My opinion on the other comment are all based on my observation of r/msians and r/msianfood, both build from the ground up using the same method.
Though i must admit running a satellite community is tougher than building a new sub, but i think it’s worth a try.
Hey, a new face! Welcome!
Great point actually, I’ll speak to hyatt about her experience bootstrapping r/mys. She did that incredibly well. There are definitely some tools we can use here.
Yeah it’s paid - I’m sponsoring this initial period but if this becomes an ongoing thing we’ll probably figure out donations or something, so the community can properly own the server. It’s real cheap though, honestly!
(Also hmmmm there’s definitely something wrong with the active user stats, you’ve just joined recently, it was 67 before, and it’s still 67 now. But I’m going to bed - more replies tomorrow!)
seems like I’m the only one who recognised you 🙈
That’s exciting! This place seems to be growing into the biggest & most vibrant Malaysian community on the Fediverse yet (though mstdn.my on mastodon is also fairly happening).