We’re going to need to participate on normie platforms like reddit in order to get more users & content here. We’re also going to want to have a place on reddit (and elsewhere) where some of our content can thrive and become more accessible.
Apparently, Facebook is already marking our URL as spam. I’d imagine reddit will follow if not already. So we can’t just dump links onto every marginally left-wing space.
Let this be a thread to spitball some ideas.
That’s fair. I’m just saying there’s no need to discourage OP or the big thinking. I strongly disagree with “we will never be reddit”.
I remember it clearly back on reddit when reddit’s numbers were probably in the 1000-10000 “currently online” numbers. Back when Digg was the titan of the internet and Reddit was the small extremely nerdy techie hangout. Reddit back then was basically dual-power to Digg and when Digg’s userbase got pissed off enough they made a transition in massive waves.
We’re creating a space that will grow because it can’t exist on literally any corporate social media that currently exists. The numbers are growing and they’re going to keep growing. We’ll become a strong large community and then coexist on the internet until a “revolutionary moment” hits other major services through pissing off their userbases and crises occurs due to company sales and new owners deciding to milk the users to death. We’ll push on through those things and consistently grow due to the level of quality we can be without pissing off the users with corporate bullshit. Real and authentic communities will blossom well and eventually you CAN count on the corporate platforms to eventually kill themselves through the usual patterns of online media.
and eventually you CAN count on the corporate platforms to eventually kill themselves through the usual patterns of online media.
“What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers."
Eventually every platform ends up sold to some people that don’t give a shit about the platform itself but in its power to make them boatloads of money. They’re quite happy to see any platform’s quality level deteriorate massively as long as they can make a profit during that. This inevitably leads to a better platform catching people’s eye and people moving there. Rinse repeat.
This is the cycle of online platforms over and over. Eventually they all kill themselves through virtue of either not adapting to better platforms existing or being the best platform and committing suicide opening up to other platforms. It might take decades in the case of some platforms that have had good leadership steering the boat the entire time (Facebook springs to mind) but they all eventually succumb to this.
Changes of ownership consistently kill internet platforms. Especially the community-oriented ones. Content based platforms are harder but ultimately they all deteriorate into lowest common denominator content that drives anyone looking for niche content elsewhere.
I’m not discouraging big thinking. Or the OP. OP replied and didn’t seem terribly offended by what I said. But nobody can explain why creating a subreddit, copy/pasting all our content to it, would create sustained growth and long-term active userbase. If people wanted to see our memes they could just go to the subreddit. Why go to a completely different site, sign up, just to see 99% the same content? I don’t think the amount of people dying to say “kill all slave owners” is as high as you guys are thinking. That’s all. I’m not insulting the website.
You have to provide incentive for people to come here. And by people I mean more than chronically online leftists who just want to share forbidden memes they can’t on reddit. OP said spitball, I’m spitballing.
I’d definitely say user growth is less important than influence and extending the reach of the content here. Both are somewhat inextricably linked.
The community here is already fairly substantial. Users seem pretty active judging from the volume of responses to this post alone. I’d rather have a smaller, tighter-knit community fostering quality discussion than a bigger community where the discussion is lackluster.
Influence I see as a much more important goal…part of which comes from having enough users to produce content to reach a variety of people.
Having a subreddit would probably siphon some users if it were the same exact community & content, but we need somewhere to make inroads to normies if we want to accomplish anything besides shitposting amongst ourselves. I think it would be beneficial to have a reddit chapo embassy where people point users to the greater community here.
I would have never ended up here if someone didn’t post a link to reddit. Same goes for lemmygrad.
I’d like to believe that some of us aren’t just extremely online and do work on the ground. It would probably be best if the activist/organizer types moved way from Twitter/Reddit and other corporate-owned platforms to find and share info here where fash & chuds are less likely to be. Idk who controls this lemmy instance & the rest of the tech stack, but I’d imagine they’re less willing to hand info over to authorities as well.
I don’t think we’ll ever hit anywhere close reddit/digg numbers given that we’re much more niche. There’s also lemmygrad occupying almost our exact same niche (I see this as a good thing)…Not to mention the dev lemmy server having a sizable leftist community too. We’ll likely be competing with a swarm of other lemmy servers and other federated/decentralized platforms.
I’m hopeful, but I’m pretty sure we have a much lower ceiling compared to something with as broad of an appeal as reddit. Hell, do we even have *anywhere close * to the numbers of users as chud platforms like Parler or thedonald.win (excluding all the astroturfed traffic)? That would be a decent benchmark.
I think we’ll become much more of an internet and cultural powerhouse than other similar platforms if we actually put effort into it but nowhere close to rivaling today’s giants. We may very well become the default left-wing social media, but the average joe either wants to avoid politics like the plague or share a platform with well-known people, brands, and content creators. Lemmy as a whole…possibly…but it’d take the exact scenario you describe and more, and corporations will try their hardest to increase profits while not making the same mistakes as digg and pissing a majority of their userbase off enough to migrate.
How people imagine decentralised/federated social media will work and how it will actually play out are completely different.
Reality is that ONE of the fediverse projects will hit it big and all the others will gain some crumbs from that but it will be that one single big project that succeeds that continues on as a major internet force.
ChapoChat’s trajectory is going to be the same trajectory as reddit’s as long as it doesn’t make a catastrophic mistake that sees the community abandon it. Reddit’s trajectory was as a source for tech news and tech discussion initially and then slowly slowly slowly branching into hobby related content after receiving massive influxes of users from the complete and total collapse of Digg. At the time of the collapse of Digg there were still only a hundred thousand or so active users of reddit. 10k-20k was considered a BIG subreddit back in them days. Breakouts that sailed into the 200k region in the first year of the digg exodus were all the default communities.
ChapoChat’s trajectory will be the same, but instead of being a tech community that then transitioned into many entertainment communities while maintaining its strong tech core (before later killing it off) it is a politics community that will transition into many entertainment communities while maintaining its strong political core… And hopefully not later killing it off.
The pathway is the same one and I do not see the political core as a barrier to creating high quality entertainment communities that other people want to take part in. If the communities are good, if they have high quality content that they’re not getting easily elsewhere because they’re run by libs or focus on easily digestable garbage content, if the content is actually good? People will use them. They will use them because they like them and those communities create value. If the communities do things like start projects that have actual value in those hobbies people will be forced to visit ChapoChat in order to consume the thing that they value because the source of that content is literally here.
The politics doesn’t matter. The vast majority of people do not give a fuck if they want hobby content. If the hobby communities are good it won’t be a barrier at all.
We aren’t and never will be as disgusting as 4chan is to the mass majority. The vast majority of people are apolitical and as long as a place isn’t saying something outrageously racist or fascist people really aren’t turned away. Even then, outrageous fascist and racist shit still doesn’t turn many apolitical people away from consuming something like /v/ on 4chan. Don’t overestimate how much starting off from a political core is going to affect the site.
Not growth necessarily. Just a non-negligible step up from the former sub(s) in terms of influence. We used to feed content downstream to other subs like r/LateStageCapitalism. Outside of reddit, we don’t have some useful things to bolster our impact like crossposting or a shared login to the rest of the site. Getting regular folks to stumble across our content is going to be much harder here, especially now while we’re in our nacency.
I’m less concerned about our numbers and more concerned about the posting vacuum created in the absence of r/chapotraphouse and the likes. The current state of lefty reddit is garbage, and us being outside of the rest of the reddisphere means chuds could have an even greater grip on public perception than they do now. If we don’t have a plan to either get users to migrate here or export culture to reddit, we will only lose what little influence we had.
Honestly, I think a simple reddit bot that posts our top image content with our URL watermarked to the appropriate subreddits would go a long way.
