Hi all, just an update from this post, where we asked for input on site direction and growth. We took these on board, and did some research into what other country instances and forums are doing.

Here’s what we propose – input welcome before we start making changes!

1. Theme weeks, aka bootstrapping and promoting communities to r/Malaysia

  • Malaysians have interests which don’t get much airtime on r/my and r/mys, such as badminton, cars, dating, football, gaming, property, etc.
  • If we can bootstrap a community for a topic, we can promote that to the main sub and see if this brings users across.
  • This may be as simple as making sure the community has a dozen posts + a few dozen comments before promoting on r/my. So we might try some “theme weeks” to get things rolling!
  • How about !malaysian_dating as a fun and slightly clickbaity first test?

2. !Malaysia channel

  • We noticed that lemmy.ca, aussie.zone, and feddit.uk all have a !Country channel, and this is their largest community
  • We think this is like r/malaysia on reddit: the definitive way for Malaysian nyets on the lemmyverse to get Malaysian content on their feed
  • So we’ve set up !Malaysia. Perhaps we can treat this like r/Malaysia and start crossposting country-level content there! (Edit: Some complications, we’re still figuring out the optimal pattern for this)

3. Upgrades and mobile apps

  • We’re hearing a bunch of feedback that Lemmy is hard to get into, especially on mobile.
  • 0.18.1 finally dropped today with a bunch of quality-of-life fixes (it’s a week late). So we’re taking the site down tonight to upgrade! Should be about 15 mins if nothing goes wrong. Upgrade complete!
  • Once we’re up to date, we’ll add recommendations for trusted iOS and Android apps to our switching guide! Recommendations added!

4. Improving moderator coordination

  • The admin team’s main role with growth is to create opportunities for r/Malaysia users to visit and give us a try. But once they get here, we need communities’ help to convince them to create an account and stick around!
  • And this will only happen if the whole experience is compelling: Sticky and unique content, good discussions, an interesting default frontpage.
  • We feel this may need closer coordination with community mods. What works best? Should we start a Discord? Long-lived !meta post? Some other channel?
  • We’re also working towards getting you community stats. Subscriber growth charts, comments per post, pageviews, uniques, etc.

Input and ideas of all kinds super welcome. Thanks for joining us on the journey of building this place up!!

  • @dcxOPMA
    1•1 year ago

    Finally had some space to reply!

    Re: Why now

    • First, I feel like we’re still at a very dangerous point, where if this place gets quiet for a few days, or some dumb thing happens (like minor drama), or 2-3 regular commenters quit the site, enough people may drift away that the site can go into a death spiral and not recover. We’re much safer than we were a week ago. But we are not safe yet. I have a very strong instinct about this: building a community is like kindling a fire. It’s easy to keep a strong fire burning. Users get a lot of value from a big site (e.g. people are hating reddit but still visit). But a small flame goes out in one small gust. The more users we have, the more wind resistant we will be.
    • Second, I feel we need to get in the habit / practice of having regular user inflows from larger channels. I feel that passive word-of-mouth growth is not trustworthy for sustaining us over longer periods, and I would like the site to be larger to avoid a death spiral. And the sooner we do it, the better for us. More users means more content, means funner site! And sure the site’s a little undercooked now, but it’s always going to be undercooked in some ways… and more importantly, the people who join at the early promo waves are the type of people we need anyway. Research in marketing has shown that (1) early adopters are okay with things being janky (they prioritise novelty more), and (2) it takes 1-2 dozen exposures to a product or service before mainstream users will give it a try. So the users we get in early promotion waves will be the right ones!
    • I agree that the site seems to be starting to show signs of growth though via our passive flows! The main numbers I am watching are the daily active users count + daily thread comment counts, and these have been sitting very still until just recently. That’s the thing that was giving me concern. (Like, if we are seeing new names pop up, and the daily actives aren’t going up, that means we’re churning users quite hard…)

    Re: !Malaysia

    • I agree that this is not ideal given we have so many other overlapping subs. I tried crossposting and that sucked, it creates a whole new and separate empty comments section.
    • But I still strongly believe that we should have a country-level “subreddit replacement”. Without this, there is no obvious flagship country community for Malaysia who come to the Lemmyverse via other channels than r/Malaysia. We’re doing our country a disservice by not having this; I’m willing to do a little legwork to fix this issue.
    • I’m looking into ways to work around this. There may be a technical solution. Maybe we can create a “virtual” community, which aggregates the feeds of a few real subs. Or less good, maybe we can relocate !news. Country-level subs have different characters on reddit, and some countries do pure news subs. It’s not necessarily wrong. E.g. r/Australia is very news heavy, most of the more cosy stuff happens in state or city-level subs.
    • Annoyed_🦀 A
      2•1 year ago

      Just a very quick reply, imma propose something on notion soon, i’ll give your answer a read later on 👌