I think most of us agree that the main problem which Lemmy has today is its lack of users. This is not for technical reasons, as we know it is quite stable and usable. The main cause is that the project is not widely known yet. In this post I will propose what we can do to change that.
First, lets clarify why we should promote Lemmy. Clearly there are many different reasons, and every person prioritizes them differently. So I will just give some common examples:
- Promote open source (and all the benefits that entails)
- No advertising or tracking
- Allow communities to manage themselves, instead of being controlled by corporations
- Making Lemmy more active, particularly if you would like to see more discussions on certain topics
So how can we promote Lemmy?
I think one of the most effective thing we can do at this point is to post about Lemmy in other communities where we are active. This has the benefit that other people already trust us to some degree. Open source projects looking to setup a forum might also be a good target. When doing this, we should consider which aspects of the project would be most important to the target audience, and emphasize those.
Another option is to contact bloggers, video creators, podcasters or others, and suggest that they report about Lemmy. As above, it is important to adjust the message to the target audience. Because Lemmy is quite small, it is unlikely that major tech magazines or professional content creators would care about it. Instead we should focus on smaller creators. This will also lead to more sustainable growth, and give us some legitimacy in the eyes of bigger creators.
In both cases, we should avoid doing anything that might be perceived as spam. It is better to create one or two high-quality messages, which will give a good impression of the project, rather than a dozen generic ones that tarnish the reputation.
It is worth noting that some important features are still missing in Lemmy, particularly mod tools (we are going to implement them in the next ~12 months). There also aren’t many different instances yet.
When promoting Lemmy like this, please avoid linking to lemmy.ml directly. This instance is already too big relative to other instances, and it is not meant to be a “flagship instance” (What is lemmy.ml?). Instead you should try to find an appropriate instance on join-lemmy.org and link to it, or link to the joinlemmy site directly. You can also explicitly encourage the creation of new instances.
On a side note, it might be worth mentioning the many ways that people can contribute to Lemmy (again depending on the audience). There are the obvious ones, like writing code for lemmy and lemmy-ui, writing documentation or translating. There are also multiple interesting options to create new projects, such as:
- Create an alternative frontend: nojs frontend like lemmy-lite, a traditional forum frontend or something like stackoverflow
- Create a new client, be it for mobile, desktop or terminal.
- Gather instance statistics using lemmy-stats-crawler, and build some nice graphs.
By the way, Lemmy is not just a Reddit alternative, so there is no reason to limit the promotion to Reddit.
To help with these promotion efforts, @dessalines and I would be happy to give interviews via email (in English, German or Spanish). For that, they can get in touch by mailing contact@lemmy.ml.
Gotta think about target audience. Which people are the most likely to want to use Lemmy in its current state? In my view, these are other fediverse users who have not heard of lemmy. These folks already understand how decentralized social media works and have already committed to it. They are the easiest sell to using this platform.
Outside of that audience, it would be hard to convince people to use lemmy. Lemmy doesn’t have a critical mass of users to generate enough interesting new content. So when you try to get “normies” to use this platform, they have multiple obstacles to deal with. They have to figure out what the fediverse is and how it works, and they have to be patient with the current content shortage. You may reach a few people who check out lemmy, but a small fraction will be retained. But if you go to people on platforms like Mastodon and Peertube, a larger share of the people will stay on.
Beyond this, another idea I had was to use influencers. Particularly influencers who have shared about the fediverse before. For example, Shonalika and Non-Compete on YouTube have previously made videos on the Fediverse, and have shared their accounts on there for their viewers to follow. Finding, and contacting people like this as the developer, maybe they would make a lemmy community or instance for themselves, and ask their followers to check that out. I think it could bring in a large wave of people, at least by lemmy standards.
I disagree that we should limit our promotion to the fediverse. I dont think that its much harder to get started with Lemmy compared to getting started with Mastodon etc. Its not necessary to understand federation to use Lemmy, rather they will figure it out after using Lemmy for a while.
And I guess its true that we dont have a critical mass yet, whatever that means. Thats exactly why we should promote it widely, because then it will reach some people who are interested.
These influencers are exactly what i’m talking about, but it doesnt make much sense for me to contact them, because i’m not part of their audience or community, and dont know them well. So it makes much more sense for someone from their audience to contact them, explain what Lemmy is and why they should care about it. If they are interested, you can get us in touch with them.
Don’t think of it as limiting, think of it as focusing your efforts on the people most likely to respond.
Critical mass is a social network term that comes from nuclear physics. Small amounts of uranium will not react without outside pressure, but at a critical mass of uranium, a chain reaction will occur, and the reaction becomes self sustaining and turns into a meltdown.
In social media, small networks of users need effort to keep growing. However, there is a certain number of people where a social network starts growing on its own, independent of promotion.
I agree that federation is no harder to understand starting with lemmy than on mastodon. My point is that mastodon has a large user base and lemmy doesn’t. So for a fed newbie, they have two hurdles to jump through at lemmy instead of one at mastodon.
I realize you guys have a lot on your plates already, and we are flooding you with ideas. When I get some free time, I can look into that influencer thing myself.
I dont want to limit the promotion at all, in fact I want Lemmy users to spread it in all kinds of places where it makes sense.
Maybe I should have been more explicit that this post is a call to action for Lemmy users, and not something we as developers are planning to do. Writing it like that seemed a bit too direct though.
From my experience, it was actually much easier to start with fediverse and eventually understand the core concepts of fediverse and federation on smaller platforms, where one can, I think, see more clearly when something gets federated across those few existing instances as opposed to larger platforms with many various instances federating with each other in an extensive cobweb of federations.
For example here, it is much easier to spot a federated post, because from a view of the user’s instance, that post is standing out from the mass of other (local) posts much more as it still might be considered somewhat of a curiosity one might rather notice, whereas on, for example, Mastodon, people communicate across multitude of instances and federate with everything, and so the principles itself could be a little hidden and not so clear for the newbie fediverse user to see. That is at least how I experienced my firsts with fediverse.
I would say Lemmy is an excellent example of what I would consider a newbie-friendly fediverse experience. After a while, the new fediverse user can freely explore other platforms as Mastodon, PeerTube etc., as they will already have a little knowledge of how to navigate the fediverse and will be able to notice its elements on larger federated platforms, where nearly every post is federated, and some users could think these features are something specific to the platform instead of common attributes of the whole fediverse.
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