Site direction: What happens next?
Site direction: What happens next?
This post is for bouncing around thinking and ideas around future plans for monyet.cc!
Where we are now
As of 25 June, we have achieved a minimum bar for success vs. our goals on this post.
- We have proven that our community can defintely set up shop here. Hundreds of people have switched over very smoothly: posters, readers, regulars, everyone.
- What this means: We have built the boats. If reddit dies, either suddenly or gradually over years, we won’t lose the community we’ve created together.
- Before reddit there were lots of cosy forums across the internet. In the worst case, we can be one of them.
- A huge thank-you to everyone who has created an account and taken part in this experiment. Especially those of you who have been helping to make this place lively and fun ❤️
The next challenge
r/Malaysia comes back online tomorrow. Can we keep this place alive and healthy, and build it into something that can thrive independently of Reddit Inc.?
- This seems much smarter than just declaring success and putting the site in hibernation.
- monyet.cc could be a sister community like our Discord and r/malaysians, except not be 100% dependent on Reddit for new users!
- We know it can be done, because lowyat.net does it: they have literally millions of users.
What helps our chances: This week we've confirmed that this platform can serve the community in many ways that reddit can't. Because we now have "subreddits":
- Local language communities, like 中文嘛嘛档 and Berita
- Local interest communities, like AMG, Pets, Meme Everyday. Food hunting, meetup groups, relationship advice, students, bargain hunting, etc.
- Local classifieds! Job boards, buying and selling, dating / personal ads, promoting local artists, newtubers, businesses, etc.
Big questions
1. Direction: What do people think about this direction? This is still very young thinking.
2. Growth: Having all of this good stuff depends on us convincing lots of users to regularly use monyet.cc. Any thoughts on how to do this?
- Our current best idea is that instead of competing with the types of content on r/my, we could try to be a complement: focus on stuff we can't offer there.
- For example, we remove a lot of classifieds, newtubers, etc. We could start redirecting all this here.
- What kinds of content might people enjoy coming here regularly for?
Thanks again everyone!!
We currently have Care sub, with the exception of Tuesday Mental Health thread, there isn't much going on.
I would like to link or import the resources that snel has prepared on r/my here (I've asked for his permission, and he's OK with it). Another thing is i would like to encourage the sub visibility by having a Weekly Mental Health Thread, that's refreshed on every Wednesday.
Inputs are welcome.
Since I agreed to come onboard, thought I might contribute some ideas too, just some ideas though -
Firstly thanks for putting the wiki in place, really glad to see it over here. I've since tried to play around with editing the information and to be more familiar with Lemmy - which is still very confusing to me, haha - and seemed like things are good.
For the Weekly MH Thread, I've been thinking - so previously we have such a thread was I believe mostly for the mods to manage the sub better, on one hand to encourage/let people talk about MH but at the same time balance the topics appearing on the main sub, so we have a dedicated MH thread. But from what I see here Lemmy works a bit differently, balancing topics seemed to be less of an issue.
In a way, from what I'm seeing, what we have here is more akin to /mhp than the MH thread in /my, the whole space is reserved for people who wants to talk about MH things, anytime. And if this is how it works, we don't actually need to have a special/separate MH thread, probably.
But at the same time I actually agree very much with you on doing something to increase the visibility - I'd like more people to utilise this place really! - so I'm just thinking if we can do something about it.
One of the ideas I had is that - since we have this whole space for MH things, rather than a Weekly MH Thread/Check-in Thread (which if based on how it works in /my, just a dedicated thread for general MH talks essentially ) - we can have something different, something interesting that can also drive people to this space while keeping in line with the purpose of having this space (to promote MH, to find info/help), like rather than having a general MH Thread, we can have "themed threads", e.g. Self-care Thread, Ranting/No-advice-needed Thread, Progress Thread etc. (just throwing out ideas here).
And the main Care space can always be used for general posts/for people to seek help.
Should help with throwing attention our way.
Just to see what do you (and Liz) think.
PS. I'm planning also to migrate my MENTARI post over (might warrant a separate post because it's a major resource which is also quite commonly asked).
Hey snel, welcome on board, if there's anything you need the admin help, let us know, we'd happy to help 👌
The creation of monyet.cc and its structure reminds me of the early days BBS sites (you can see the comparison with the Taiwan's PTT BBS) in which the local interests thrive while complement each other at the same time. In contrast to BBS system, Lemmy is a decentralised system in which we can federate with other instances outside besides monyet.cc's own communities, and separate our online presence in different Lemmy instances. As an example, besides this account, I have another account opened at other instances dedicated for tech-related interests.
My opinion is that we should still treat ourself as a better alternative to r/malaysia for those who want to discus specific topics in a specialised community. It is a limitation of Reddit as it is dominated by English countries' users which might not resonate well with our local circumstances. But we don't seek for isolation, instead we accepts such openness in the condition where there is a place for us to express the issues in local context such as those in sciencetech. Example from the OP, Malaysian Vtubers are easily get ignored by the vastness of Vtuber industry. We may have a dedicated place for them in monyet.cc, either in the form of independent community or combine with other community such as Anime community.
The problem that we'll soon to be facing if the growth of Lemmy is continuing, is the lack of moderator. Who is responsible for the moderation? The creator of the community? But what if things get complicated and the creator is willing to let go the power? This question has to be considered when we are discussing the future of monyet.cc. Despotism could spike a lot of issues which is not ideal, we might need to have a democratisation of the moderation in order to place a heathy community.
Great ideas, thanks!! You raise a very interesting question in your last paragraph. My personal hope is that if we can make this place into a healthy and self-sustaining thing, we can move towards self-governance as time passes. You're absolutely right that this shouldn't be constrained by the limits of the founding team!
We still have a lot of bed making to do. A lot of hyper-local/hyper-topical communities are yet to be created. Some are trivial (region/state/city subs/communities) and some are not. I'd like to go ahead and create some of these but I'm in all levels of indecisiveness e.g.
- Should public and road transport be split or combined? how about cycling?
- What content should I seed the communities with? (@stormy001 can be of great help pulling up news articles)
- I'm not into many interests and not aware of nuances so what I made might be way off the mark.
And most importantly I don't want to be mod (aka landed gentry) to so many communities at once lol
What I think we can do is mirror lowyat's boards as communities to hopefully cover most of the bases. After we have that then we have the pull factor to attract terminally online monyets away from leddit. Show them "See how much more stuff we have!"