Self-promotion is a natural form of Commons outreach

[Tomat0]

Original title: Self-Promotion on Lemmy

(@aschrijver: I modified the topic title to express the SX-related insight on the subject matter.)

My usage of Reddit for the past couple years has been mostly self-promotion, as Reddit happens to be absolutely perfectly suited as a format towards organic/free marketing. Lemmy pretty much adopts the Reddit model, and as a result in my time, I’ve found it similarly suitable for promoting Fediverse content since you essentially have a community full of people with an interest in the Fediverse, each in their own explicit interest communities, it’s super convenient for promoting content hosted on the Fediverse (music, videos, art, etc).

Content is the bread and butter of social media, you can have the greatest technological foundation but if there’s nothing worth following, there’s no point. The Fediverse community has had a tendency to neglect content, with content-centric platforms (such as PeerTube or Funkwhale) getting less attention than discussion-based ones (such as Lemmy/Mastodon).

In order to create a sustainable Fediverse culture, we need to do the legwork of promoting content. Creators have to be connected with audiences, so creators get engagement and are incentivized to post more, and audiences have a reason to return to these sites and follow up on content.

Lemmy has the potential to play a key role here: my proposal is the following. We create a community (Lemmy equivalent of a subreddit) for self-promotion. Small creators are encouraged to post here for free engagement, but on two conditions:

1. They check out someone else’s content on the page and leave feedback.
2. Their content must be uploaded to a Fediverse platform.

A few years back I created this at /c/selfpromo, but creating the page is the easy part. Actually seeding it with content and activity is harder, but I do think with a coordinated effort might make it possible.

If anyone has any ideas for seeding something like this or any feedback regarding the strategy, please let me know in this thread. If we can get this off the ground and as a self-sustaining ecosystem for mutual content exposure, it could have a great impact I think.

[addy]

That’s a great idea!

I just looked up a couple subreddits around self-promo but they seem to be all about NSFW content. I presume what you’re proposing is more SFW and meant for people of diverse ages and backgrounds.

In that context, I believe one possiblity is to reach out to high quality creators on existing popular platforms (like YouTube, Instagram, etc) and invite them to share their creations on such a self-promo channel.

It’s reasonable to expect most such creators to not pay heed to the suggestion, but some of them may take interest. Especially the ones who do put a lot of thought into their work, as they’d be likely to ‘think’ about the ethics as well as the possible returns on minimal extra effort.

In fact, I would really love to do this at least on my own because many of my favourite creators aren’t there on Lemmy or the Fediverse. E-mail seems like the most accessible option for such reach outs. At the same time I cannot expect much of a response. It’s not a great strategy, certainly not a complete one, but it’s the one I have at the moment.

[aschrijver]

I would like to add something related to how this topic related to SX. Social experience design starts from the perspective of each individual who participates in a commons, by means of Personal social networking. Social networking itself is defined as any human interaction between people, both online and offline. A person explores the commons based on self-interested motives and in hopes of improving their work / hobby / life balance. And this forms the foundation for collaborative arrangements and cocreation to take place.

With the above in mind, more friendly and natural terminology can be chosen, which will in turn help foster the culture for proactive participation in healthy commons, where we want to be part of.

Commons outreach

Instead of “self-promotion”, which has negative connotations (it fits ‘influencer-culture’ best), under Social coding commons and SX we speak of “Outreach”. To literally reach out towards peers in areas of the social network that relate to personal interests and passsions. And not on a one-time basis, but as a continual process, part of the FSDL (here in both its meanings, i.e. “Free software development lifecycle” and “Fediverse solution delivery lifecycle”).

With the social network representing mycelia, doing outreach means growing tendrils to seek out furtile connections, find nourishment, and exchange nutrients that help make the network stronger. This holistic notion of “outreach” helps in very deliberately get the most out of participation in any online network, in the pursuit of self-interests which provides the motivation to participate proactively. And being holistic also allows us to be strategic about this, which is only smart, with time and attention being the scarcest commodities on this planet.

In the past I defined the concept of “Weaving in public”, which is helpful to anyone you weave for, while it helps increase your own luck and serendipity. A win-win situation, if done well. SX builds further on this concept and expands it to become Weaving in commons. Weaving in commons adds a third win when synergies from the commons based affiliation network are tapped into, and taken into account. To track and evolve these, SX defines the concept of a Triple win.

These concepts to be elaborated in due time…

For this topic, yes you can do “self-promotion” on Lemmy, but the larger realization is that ANY communication online constitutes you doing outreach in hopes to get the most out of your time spent online. And how that self-awareness allows you to be very deliberate about the nature of your communication and time expenditure in particular channels.