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:
- They check out someone else’s content on the page and leave feedback.
- 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.