Transcribing as a growth hack is cool because it’s also more accessibility for disabled people. Probably even more helpful if you put your transcription of images as alt text.

I’ve always seen sourcing more as a preemptive “someone’s going to ask where I got it from” or a personal ethics thing you might do if you value it, not growth hacking.

Clickbait is a push-away factor for me. I’m not here for outrage.

Whenever you see content that would fit in other communities, mention them in a comment. Even if it isn’t consequently cross posted there, people looking at the post are likely to be interested, leading to discovery.

If its a non-meme community, like an actual serious topic. Post memes about it.

Post images instead of text. (Look at the bad facts community. Can’t remember the exact name.) That guy gets it.

Personally the name and image of the community make a bit of difference to me. Although not much.

One I use, is stagger crossposts.

If you’re not sharing something time sensitive, post to each relevant community with several hours of time delay inbetween. (I often do days or even weeks)

This will prevent the usual de-duplication of the posts, thereby preventing the biggest post from cannibalizing the upvotes from the rest, and is a soft excuse to repost something a few times.

People will discover the communities which were posted to earlier, from the newr posts. I try to go from smallest to biggest in order, as the first will benefit the most.

One of the things that I think we can make better use of here is partnerships with other groups (communities, magazines, what have you). This is especially useful with other on-server groups, for several reasons, but it’s generally applicable. Building a web of trust and engagement can go a long way. Obviously, forced, artifical engagement-for-engagement isn’t the goal, but creating a sense of “these are other spaces we support” can be big.

Personally, I’m a proponent of themed servers, but that’s a step earlier than what we’re talking about here. But having servers focused on certain topics can help keep moderators and admins engaged, potentially reduce inter-node communication, reduce federation issues, etc. Plus, it comes with some of that “trust network” built right in.

This is a good thought provoking post, but I think most of the methods you describe here actually work against the Fediverse, both in terms of desired outcomes and actual growth.

• If a user comes to Lemmy (for example) and sees the same stale meme feed and engagement bait they see on Reddit, what’s the incentive to switch? What makes Lemmy unique?

• Of the users who are here and understand the reasons for not using commercial social media, most are probably trying to avoid the bulk of the sort of content made by the suggestions you give.

• Growth-for-growth’s-sake puts more burden on instance admins for reasons that don’t involve growing a sense of community (presumably the reason they are investing time in the first place).

My point is that Lemmy can never compete with Reddit in terms of attention and distractability and trying to build “community” around that here will always fail. We should lean into Lemmy’s strengths, focus on growing communities and discussions and the kind of thing the Reddit algorithm suppresses.