The biggest problem people seem to have with Lemmy at the moment is the lack of content.
If and when r/newzealand comes back online, it would be possible to set up a bot that copied new posts from there to lemmy.nz (and possibly from other NZ related subreddits). That would help get the content we need to get people to stay here.
There are downsides to this. Most content here would be from Reddit, rather than this community - at least for the time being. And there would be posts asking for advice, etc. that don’t make much sense without OP here.
The second issue would be helped a lot by filtering out posts with Advice, Discussion, Meta or AMA flairs. We could also use the other r/newzealand flairs to repost to the appropriate communities here.
So what do people think? Is that something we want to do?
EDIT: What do people think of @Dave@lemmy.nz’s idea of posting into its own community, so people could opt out in or out?
EDIT 2: It doesn’t seem like this is popular. People seem happy for content to be copied over by hand, but not by a bot. To be clear, I’m not talking about bot-generated content, I’m talking about grabbing human-generated content with a bot. Some people seem to have got that confused. It would be doing a kind of manual federation of r/newzealand - especially if the content was kept within it’s own community.
But it’s kind of a relief. It would have been a lot of work to set it up. On the other hand, I’m not at all keen on going back to Reddit to look for stuff to manually copy over here either. I don’t know if others are. I’m just worried that people will feel like they’re missing out on so much here that they go back. If there was a Reddit cross-post community, people would have the option to get everything from here and stay off Reddit altogether.
If we loose enough members to a lack of content, the community will die. That would be a real pity.
Content is made by members, not bots. Let’s just all put tje work in!
This would be ideal. I’d really prefer we made enough of our own content here. Personally, I’m trying my best when I can.
But at the moment, the vast majority of content here is posted by just a handful of users. I’m worried that when r/newzealand comes back, the abundance of content there vs here would be too big of a draw card for most users. We could lose many of our users, and it might be severe enough to destroy this community.
Do remember that this content would be being created by people, not bots. It would just be a bot migrating it here.
I expect the bit would only operate for a while, until we reach a critical mass of content, then it could slowly taper off.
I’m very much in two minds about this though, so it’s good to hear what others have to say.
But at the moment, the vast majority of content here is posted by just a handful of users.
I think there is a bug with sorting posts at the moment, so the listings appear quite “stale”, so that could be part of the problem.
Yeah, sorting by Hot and Active don’t work properly at the moment. It’s a known issue. Apparently the only fix is to restart the server every few hours. It will probably be fixed soon.
I’m sorting by, New, New Comments or Top Day in the meantime. That seems to work well enough.
Edit: Looking at the
3240 newest posts (the first page) on !newzealand@lemmy.nz,66%68% are from78 users. You’re in the#2#3 spot. Everyone: Be like @SamC@lemmy.nz and we won’t need any content from Reddit.Edit 2: Corrected the numbers in my last edit. Looking at all the local communities put together, it might be even more concentrated.
Yeah, we definitely need people to post not lurk.
But it’s also a long game. The fediverse has an inherent advantage over corporate social media, which is it will keep improving (for users not shareholders). It might take years, but many of the major issues will eventually be ironed out and more people will join, making it more attractive to new users.
There’s actually quite a bit of content on the Threadiverse at the moment, I think it’s about discovery now! Kbin is pretty good at finding new threads/topics and suggesting random communities. https://programming.dev/ has heaps of software communities.
It’s getting noticeably better each day. And it seems to be growing at a faster rate.
