Discussion thread - September 2023
Discussion thread - September 2023
The discussion thread is for casual and off-topic conversation that doesn't merit its own submission.
Starting to miss ArrNL. The type of election discussion there doesn't really exist anywhere else
My theory is that making this place into a community where that sort of discussion happens is a numbers game. We have 123 subscribers today and that number is growing by about 1% per day. It seems that we're getting about 1 'active' subscriber (familiar names who post content or contribute to the threads with some regularity) for every 25 or so overall subscribers. At those growth and engagement rates, we would have about 400 members and 16 of us active by the end of the year - this place will feel pretty active. It already feels a lot more active than 6-8 weeks ago when I was effectively the only one posting most weeks and most posts were getting no comments.
I think all we need to do to facilitate that growth is to keep posting and commenting regularly here ourselves - be the change, etc - make m/Neoliberal look like an interesting and active place where other people want to subscribe, post and comment themselves.
(N.B. If those growth and engagement rates carry on through next year, that would take us to around 1,000 subscribers / 40 active by end-March and 2,500 / 100 by end-June - a pretty booming community as we go through the US election season. On the one hand, I expect our growth should slow eventually, but 2,500 subscribers is still such a small fraction of the current Threadiverse that I see no reason that's unachievable! I also think that the US, UK and European Parliament all having elections next year will be a big boon to political communities generally, so there's reasons to think we could grow faster not slower. And that's without Reddit doing something else to drive the next wave of exodus...)
Yeah, it really is a numbers game. I also think the elections next year will help as well. Though, as time goes on I think we should expect the 90%, 9%, 1% rule to be the norm.
I also think one of the bigger hurdles to clear will be having viable, third-party apps. I think not having these in June stymied the reddit diaspora and if these had been up-and-running then we would probably have even more engagment now. I am hoping that Artemis exiting beta and Kbin finalizing its API soon will also help fuel growth. The simple reality is that most people use their phones moreso than their computers nowadays, so we need a good mobile portal. The webapp is good, but it's not really a replacement for a mobile app. I know lemmy has a few options with memmy and mlem, amongst some others, but even they were not ready in June.
Right now, it looks like a lot of our engagment comes from kbin.social, lemmy.world, mastodo.neoliber.al, sh.itjust.works, and some people from beehaw. I think I occasionally see some people from lemm.ee.
For those curious, here is the link to the subreddit stats for r/neoliberal: https://subredditstats.com/r/neoliberal
For whatever reason, the subreddit existed as five people for years and then took off in early 2017. I think that had to do with r/badeconomics and much of reddit taking a hard left (even moreso than it was before). I don't remember exactly. Regardless, I think we just need to keep posting and commenting until we hit a critical mass.
I’m thinking I might take a look at Why Nations Fail for a bit of light reading.
I was able to get my kbin thread booster bot for the NL mastodon working. Mastodon seems to still have some weirdness with Lemmy posts to Kbin showing up as Lemmy links instead of posts, but the bot is correctly finding the kbin threads and boosting them, which is allowing the posts to be visible to the NL Mastodon users. You can also follow @nl_kbin_booster from other Mastodon accounts too. I'll get the code out here in the next few days but let me know if you have any thoughts or questions.
Sounds awesome! What is the best way to test this? Assuming I understand correctly, all we would need to do is make a thread and the bot would find it and boost it to Mastodon?
@CoffeeAddict that's correct. I had a bug in my scheduler last night which made it miss your Armenia post, but I ran with a wider window to pick up those and it should be working now.
The bot pulls the thread RSS at https://kbin.social/rss?magazine=Neoliberal once an hour and then for each post since the last run:- performs a search on the masto instance to get the post federated and get the masto post id
- checks to see if it's already been boosted by the bot
- boosts it if not yet boosted.
This is great!
I'm going to make the main repo for this project on #Codeberg instead of Github, though I'm working on putting up a mirror over there too. Codeberg seems great for anything FOSS that you don't want to self-host, though you do lose out some Github features. Feel free to take a look at my quick and dirty work: (CW: limited tests, sloppy work - its a hobby project)
https://codeberg.org/neblib/boost-kbin-mag-bot
whomst