I’m not sure there’s really anything wrong with what’s going on now but it does seem that new users from Reddit in particular have all but dried up. Long term this will definitely be a problem. Mastodon provides a userbase in the low millions to potentially tap into and they already understand federation. Strikes me as low hanging fruit that has a lot more value than the average reddit user.
I don’t think the folks that have those sorts of qualms are necessarily the people to go after. I think the prime targets should be field experts. They were essential in establishing Reddit’s utility in the early days and there seem to be a fairly significant number of them over on Mastodon in search of deeper conversation.
I really think medium broad-topic instances are the way to go. Similar in scope to lemmy.film or lemdro.id
My thesis is basically that new users are not coming from Reddit anymore, but Mastodon users are both searching for group-like features and are likely to be positive influences over here. I’m saying they can be particularly useful in bootstrapping specialized instances (lemmy.film, literature.cafe, etc) and establishing a culture that differs from the wider threadiverse with fairly minimal advertising over on Mastodon. For the most part, if you are not already a Mastodon user or a community/instance mod you do not need to worry about this.
Do you think there would be similar frustration points in the Mastodon to Lemmy process? Obviously, I am ok with both so this may be a major blindspot of mine, but I suspect that may be a slightly easier transition.
Also those aren’t weird names for tags they are more like existing communities. Because Mastodon does not have native groups there are several implementations like https://a.gup.pe to fill the gap. Following tags like that is a similar way to go about it. They are distinct from #books or #horror. #monsterdon in particular is a weekly monster movie watch party. The point is that these are active communities with a lot of crossover potential.
Regardless of where the loss in users is coming from the major takeaway here is that we are firmly in a reinvestment phase. This will likely last until Reddit does something stupid related to the IPO but in the absence of that we will probably not see a significant uptick in growth again without major improvements to the threadiverse as a whole. That means that those of us who are personally invested in the growth of the threadiverse should be taking this time to develop the tools and features necessary to weather the next wave more gracefully than the last.
One of the biggest issue I see here is still community growth. Growing certain communities is significantly harder than others and if you don’t have a lot of crossposting potential it can be damn near impossible. As it stands, I do not see a way to fix this situation without a hot and active ranking system that takes into account the number of users active in the particular community. As part of a change like this I think we would be best served by consolidating a significant portion of the small dead communities. I think we should also strongly prefer specialized instances like lemmy.film or literature.cafe to truly take advantage of the special attention these sorts of instances are capable of providing particular topics. As it stands only a handful of them have enough broader threadiverse activity to be truly useful.
Another thing I would like to suggest is a change in recruitment strategy. At this point it seems like we are unlikely to pull a significant amount of users from Reddit without more reddit-policy-driven migration, but there are tons of highly educated and engaged users over on Mastodon that would make serious positive contributions to the tone and quality of the discourse over here. For some reason there seems to be minimal overlap between the two communities and that blows my mind. Not only that but I actively see folks disparaging Mastodon in fediverse related communities on a regular basis (and even sometimes in the Mastodon communities themselves). As far as I can tell, these are largely lingering sentiments from a Reddit/Twitter dichotomy. Remember, as things develop the lines between threaded social media and microblogging are likely to blur. A significant number of Mastodon apps already provide a threaded view and one of kbins explicit goals is very much to bridge the gap. With this in mind, Mastodon (and federated microblogging more generally) seems like the best source for new potential users.
That’s why I’m specifically suggesting we try to get them on the specialized instances. Where culture and moderation policies are least similar from Reddit. Somebody else pointed this out in the other thread and I do absolutely think if we don’t point them to a specialized instances then beehaw is the place to go.