As you probably know from the sidebar this site was started by moderators from the r/futurology subreddit, and some of us moderate both. We initially thought most of the site’s growth would come via Reddit, but it hasn’t happened that way. Our main instance - c/futurology - gets most of its subscribers from elsewhere in the fediverse. Despite several attempts with pinned posts that a few thousand people have read, only 20% of our userbase joined from Reddit.
We don’t want to spam the subreddit user base, but we have access to things like pinned posts and comments to promote this site.
We’d like to grow subscriber numbers for here from Reddit. Any ideas as to how to do this more successfully than we have previously?
I mean, if you do it successfully, you’ll probably get a message from admins about how corporate loves you and loves your community on Reddit, or else.
Ignoring that, the trick for ordinary users is getting here with minimum clicks. That’s pretty much always how mass internet works, right? Is there a way you could make the instance compatible with Google logins and similar?
I know, I know, they’re evil, but they’re also in charge of you right now unless you happen to be a die-hard hacker.
I’ve never seen that done, but I’m going to look into it, as it would be good.
Yes, added to that the clunkiness of finding and subscribing to other instances is a huge turn off. I wish we could have “special” accounts for new users, that were already subscribed to a top 50-100 curated instances. Sadly, AFAIK You can’t do that.
Hmm. It shouldn’t be too hard, without looking again at the source to be sure. I assume there’s just a table for subscribed communities, and you could make a little script that copies default rows into it.