Reddit had a wealth of niche communities. If you needed to know anything about anything, or had an obscure hobby, you’d find your people there. I would love to see Lemmy take that place.
Building this huge collection of niche communities requires a big and diverse userbase. For the ‘diverse’ part, we’d need to make sure there are no barriers scaring off less techy people. I’m glad to see that several mobile apps with good UI/UX are being developed, and on the web UI front there are also several ongoing initiatives.
But I want to talk about the ‘big’ part here. People may check out Lemmy, make an account, comment on a thread, then promptly forget about the site. Getting an inbox reminder when someone has new replies is a trigger for them to come back, and to build a new habit. But those notifications are not turned on by default. I didn’t even know it was possible until someone told me.
Now obviously, I know most of us are frustrated with how pushy commercial social media can be. Personally, I think that if the inbox mails contain a clear unsubscribe link that turns off all notifications immediately, it’s fine.
What do you think? Should we help the growth of Lemmy.world by having e-mail notifications on by default, or should we take the least pushy approach possible? A compromise between the two could be to ask people in the welcome e-mail if they want to turn on reply notifications.
I personally would hate that but you make a good point with getting people to return. I think as long as it’s painless too to disable the feature it’s not a bad idea. Maybe a weekly digest could be emailed instead but that’s probably more complicated than you want to deal with.
Alternatively, an unchecked checkbox during registration saying ‘E-mail me when I get replies’? Then people give explicit consent but at least it’s very easy to do so. I didn’t know the feature existed when I first came here, which isn’t great for audience retention.
I too have some resistance to approaching this like a marketeer but I would like to see Lemmy communities be successful. The alternative of having to use Reddit is less favorable.
Hell no. Lemmy doesn’t even have my email address. You don’t need one to sign up.
Keeping a good reputation with email to stay out of the spam filter is hard. This increases the chances of getting reported as spam. And for smaller instances it will be another thing to worry about.
Keeping a good reputation with email to stay out of the spam filter is hard.
For self-hosted mail servers, that’s definitely the case. But we’re talking about a transactional email here, not a marketing newsletter. It’s like when sites send you an order confirmation email. You didn’t explicitly enable it, but it makes sense to receive.
Lemmy doesn’t even have my email address. You don’t need one to sign up.
I appreciate giving people that choice. In the spirit of full control, we could display a ‘Send reply notifications to my inbox’ checkbox at signup, unchecked by default? Then you have explicit consent while making it easier for people to stay.
