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This is a long-lived post intended to serve as a general guide and coordination point, for people interested in building communities on monyet.cc! (Context)

We're posting this in order be linked on the sidebar. But very happy to discuss / take input and questions while it's on the frontpage!

Essentials / tl;dr

• Create away!: You're welcome to build communities of all kinds here (small exceptions below). They don't have to be Malaysia-specific!
• (Temporary) Please rate limit your posts: Please post at most 3-4 items per day on a single topic. This is a short-term measure; see below for full details.

Purpose and context

• Our shared goals: Community mods and the admin team have the same goal: we want our communities to sustain and grow!
• Our roles: The admin team's main role is to create opportunities for users to visit and give us a try. But we need communities' help to convince them to create an account and stick around!
• Need for coordination: Users will only stick around if the whole experience is compelling: Sticky and unique content, good discussions, a rich default frontage. Achieving this requires coordination between our roles.

Community policies

Disallowed communities

• Communities for sharing NSFW image content (text content is fine): Policy

Temporary posting limits

• The problem: The Lemmy frontage algorithm is currently buggy: it is not good at blending content from different communities.
  • If you post multiple things at once, they appear as a solid block on the feed.
  • If you post a lot of content on one topic, this floods the frontage and drowns out our other content.
• What this means: The above makes the frontage worse for everyone and hurts our site's growth.
  • Your posts will be downvoted: Users hate a frontage full of posts with zero comments + all on a single topic!
• Temporary measures: Until this is fixed: Please try to limit activity to 3-4 posts per day on a single topic (and space these out across the day if possible).

  • This will be fixed soon: There's active work happening on this. Reddit's algo doesn't do this, so we're confident that this is solvable.
  • We will reach out and remove posts if needed to maintain the diversity of the overall frontage.
• Sorry: This is definitely not ideal. We want you to be able to post as much as you want too! :(

Growth Protips

• Keep an eye on metrics: You want users to participate in what you're building. Engagement drives growth, and growth drives more engagement. What kinds of posts receive the most comments and upvotes?
• Start with fewer rules: In most cases, it's better to create rules as they prove necessary. Having fewer rules encourages more participation! And when you add them, your users will understand why.

Coming soon(tm)

• Higher-quality metrics
• Community Discord
• Process for promoting a community on r/Malaysia
• Expanded community-building guide

Context: This is a test of looping the community into our decision-making process via smaller posts on !meta. No promises that this will be a regular thing; this was time-consuming to write up. And likewise do let us know if this feels spammy!

After some bouncing around with the team internally, here is what we've converged on for NSFW communities.

Key considerations

Arguments for

• Sexuality is a huge part of the human experience, and so we should support this to some extent
• Reddit proves that it’s possible to host this content without degenerating
• This might be a kinda fun way of growing the userbase if done right!

Arguments against

• Unlike reddit, we don't have infrastructure to shield mods and the admin team from dealing with unsavory and traumatising content
  • People will always push boundaries. So if we allow explicit content, there will be people who post CP and other illegal stuff, e.g. leaked, personal, and private
  • Some of this may create reporting obligations: even without legal obligations there are moral obligations
  • This is not the job our team signed up to do
• If NSFW content starts becoming a big draw this might have unwanted effects on our userbase composition
• Hosting NSFW content may risk attracting unwanted official attention, especially if we grow.
  • This puts the site and the admin team at risk.
  • Counterpoint: It's possible we're actually safe as we're semi-anonymous and not hosted locally. But we haven't got the spare capacity to work through the legality + exposure risk right now.

Draft decision

NSFW text content: Generally welcome

• Gives us most of the benefits without most of the risks.
• (There are erotic novels in every MPH in the city right now!)

NSFW image content: Mature content is fine, sexually explicit content is not

• Lots of media seem to converge on two separate lines which divide the above (broadcasting, ESRB, YouTube, Pixiv, etc)
• Basically, thirsty content is welcome, but pornography and explicit content meant to be sexually gratifying is not
• For specifics, we'll probably refer out to the YouTube policy. It draws very clean and useful lines on this, and is obviously battle-tested. (We might archive a copy of this for easy reference)
• We can always revisit this choice as we grow, but this only seems likely if (a) Lemmy starts providing safety infrastructure we can lean on, and (b) we get much more clarity on our legal and other exposure

General limits: Don't be a scumbag

• Regardless of format, if you post CP, leak personal and private content, etc, you're going to get a ban (and possibly other consequences)
• I don't feel we need to set out a full list of scumbaggery here at this stage. And we hopefully won't have to for some time yet

(Thanks @weecious and @cendawanita for contributing initial thinking on this!)

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What happens now: We'll let this sit for a week for public comment, and make updates if needed. And then we'll mark this as finalised and link to it from sitewide policy places.

Additional thoughts welcome if any!

Hi all, just an update from this post, where we asked for input on site direction and growth. We took these on board, and did some research into what other country instances and forums are doing.

Here's what we propose – input welcome before we start making changes!

1. Theme weeks, aka bootstrapping and promoting communities to r/Malaysia

• Malaysians have interests which don't get much airtime on r/my and r/mys, such as badminton, cars, dating, football, gaming, property, etc.
• If we can bootstrap a community for a topic, we can promote that to the main sub and see if this brings users across.
• This may be as simple as making sure the community has a dozen posts + a few dozen comments before promoting on r/my. So we might try some "theme weeks" to get things rolling!
• How about !malaysian_dating as a fun and slightly clickbaity first test?

2. !Malaysia channel

• We noticed that lemmy.ca, aussie.zone, and feddit.uk all have a !Country channel, and this is their largest community
• We think this is like r/malaysia on reddit: the definitive way for Malaysian nyets on the lemmyverse to get Malaysian content on their feed
• So we've set up !Malaysia. Perhaps we can treat this like r/Malaysia ~~and start crossposting country-level content there!~~ (Edit: Some complications, we're still figuring out the optimal pattern for this)

3. Upgrades and mobile apps

• We're hearing a bunch of feedback that Lemmy is hard to get into, especially on mobile.
• 0.18.1 finally dropped today with a bunch of quality-of-life fixes (it's a week late). ~~So we're taking the site down tonight to upgrade! Should be about 15 mins if nothing goes wrong.~~ Upgrade complete!
• ~~Once we're up to date, we'll add recommendations for trusted iOS and Android apps to our switching guide!~~ Recommendations added!

4. Improving moderator coordination

• The admin team's main role with growth is to create opportunities for r/Malaysia users to visit and give us a try. But once they get here, we need communities' help to convince them to create an account and stick around!
• And this will only happen if the whole experience is compelling: Sticky and unique content, good discussions, an interesting default frontpage.
• We feel this may need closer coordination with community mods. What works best? Should we start a Discord? Long-lived !meta post? Some other channel?
• We're also working towards getting you community stats. Subscriber growth charts, comments per post, pageviews, uniques, etc.

Input and ideas of all kinds super welcome. Thanks for joining us on the journey of building this place up!!

This post is for bouncing around thinking and ideas around future plans for monyet.cc!

Where we are now

As of 25 June, we have achieved a minimum bar for success vs. our goals on this post.

• We have proven that our community can defintely set up shop here. Hundreds of people have switched over very smoothly: posters, readers, regulars, everyone.
• What this means: We have built the boats. If reddit dies, either suddenly or gradually over years, we won’t lose the community we’ve created together.
• Before reddit there were lots of cosy forums across the internet. In the worst case, we can be one of them.
• A huge thank-you to everyone who has created an account and taken part in this experiment. Especially those of you who have been helping to make this place lively and fun ❤️

The next challenge

r/Malaysia comes back online tomorrow. Can we keep this place alive and healthy, and build it into something that can thrive independently of Reddit Inc.?

• This seems much smarter than just declaring success and putting the site in hibernation.
• monyet.cc could be a sister community like our Discord and r/malaysians, except not be 100% dependent on Reddit for new users!
• We know it can be done, because lowyat.net does it: they have literally millions of users.

What helps our chances: This week we've confirmed that this platform can serve the community in many ways that reddit can't. Because we now have "subreddits":

• Local language communities, like 中文嘛嘛档 and Berita
• Local interest communities, like AMG, Pets, Meme Everyday. Food hunting, meetup groups, relationship advice, students, bargain hunting, etc.
• Local classifieds! Job boards, buying and selling, dating / personal ads, promoting local artists, newtubers, businesses, etc.

Big questions

1. Direction: What do people think about this direction? This is still very young thinking.

2. Growth: Having all of this good stuff depends on us convincing lots of users to regularly use monyet.cc. Any thoughts on how to do this?

• Our current best idea is that instead of competing with the types of content on r/my, we could try to be a complement: focus on stuff we can't offer there.
• For example, we remove a lot of classifieds, newtubers, etc. We could start redirecting all this here.
• What kinds of content might people enjoy coming here regularly for?

Thanks again everyone!!

Please use this post to share suggestions and feedback on everything to do with monyet.cc. Constructive criticism is super welcome!

If you're seeing this on the frontpage: FYI the purpose of this is to be a long-term suggestion box on the sidebar. But in the short term we'd love your input as to how you're finding monyet.cc so far!