… Or hoping that regular users will promote the Fediverse. At least I think mods on /r/Denmark have only considered it self-promotion when I have promoted it.
To be honest, I feel like mods are discouraged from talking about other platforms.
Small example, but we used to have a weekly self-promotion post to talk about projects, this has been stopped for a few months now (I was usually talking about our Lemmy instance there). And even if someone that is not directly related to the project talks about Lemmy, it’s considered “promotion of another social media”. I mean, to be honest, how can you prove you are not related to a project you talk about in any way?
Yea it gets difficult. I also don’t like the idea of artificially trying to insert the Fediverse into discussions whenever possible, just to make people aware. It feels very artificial or forced or like propaganda or something. And then you get into astroturfing as you say.
But what’s the alternative? People aren’t going to discover the wider social internet when they only visit the 5 biggest websites.
Currently people discover Lemmy through a few ways
/r/RedditAlternatives, where Lemmy is mentioned a lot
if they read about enshittification (Cory Doctorow), and research a bit, they might hear about us
open source, leftist or tech (e.g. hackernews) communities, which is probably why there is a huge bias here on these topics
To improve the second point, if any major tech blog would write about Lemmy, that would give a huge boost of visibility, but usually when they mention the Fediverse, they mostly speak about Mastodon.
Yeah, same here for other national subs.
It makes sense that we cannot really promote within Reddit itself, but that leaves us waiting for a specialized blog or website to talk about Lemmy.
… Or hoping that regular users will promote the Fediverse. At least I think mods on /r/Denmark have only considered it self-promotion when I have promoted it.
To be honest, I feel like mods are discouraged from talking about other platforms.
Small example, but we used to have a weekly self-promotion post to talk about projects, this has been stopped for a few months now (I was usually talking about our Lemmy instance there). And even if someone that is not directly related to the project talks about Lemmy, it’s considered “promotion of another social media”. I mean, to be honest, how can you prove you are not related to a project you talk about in any way?
Yea it gets difficult. I also don’t like the idea of artificially trying to insert the Fediverse into discussions whenever possible, just to make people aware. It feels very artificial or forced or like propaganda or something. And then you get into astroturfing as you say.
But what’s the alternative? People aren’t going to discover the wider social internet when they only visit the 5 biggest websites.
Indeed.
Currently people discover Lemmy through a few ways
To improve the second point, if any major tech blog would write about Lemmy, that would give a huge boost of visibility, but usually when they mention the Fediverse, they mostly speak about Mastodon.