I think discord in particular would be a great place to recruit new users from, but i think one thing that could expediate the arrival of the specifoc people you want is to have communities they might find interesting.

So Maybe make a community specifically for chinese people/ about china, and post some stuff there (memes are pretty handy at getting people to stay on lemmy!)

That way when you ask people to join lemmy, you have a sales pitch in the form of existing communities they'd like.

Some selling points we have at the moment are:

• dank memes
• real people, minimal/zero AI
• in depth conversations
• Simplicity of site
• quietness/peaceful (though what we're advocating for here seems to be to change that, which is also fine)

Yeah, that’s the definition of mainstream. I remember that SXSW when everyone was trying to get their friends to try this indie social media app called Twitter. I wonder what happened to that little app?

People from my experience usually need to see an immediate benefit to do anything. Compared to consolidated platforms, the fediverse may seem barren. So feeding the place with contents should gradually make here (or virtually anywhere tbf) more enticing to people.

Also worth noting the bigger fediverse platforms have the option to select the post/comment's language at the time of writing, and to filter feeds by languages of choice of the user. If someone wants or is more comfortable with getting contents in Chinese for one reason or another, you or whomever else posting in Chinese may be specially helpful to bring people here.

Also, a small concession may be needed: to still use the platforms you'd wish to avoid, to try to raise awareness of alternatives, directly or indirectly.

And if someone asks what instance they should join, don't make it too complicated. Have some instance at ready and give that, preferably. Too many options may scare people away, similar to Linux with all its distros.

And lastly, some loose points about reach within the fediverse:

• Lemmy is mostly isolated from microblogging platforms, e.g. Mastodon, so its reach is generally more reduced.
• Friendica and Mbin feel like the more mature/standardized of the platforms capable of connecting between the "threadiverse" and microblogging platforms, so maybe worth using them instead for better reach?
• We're in the ActivityPub protocol; you could expand reach also by using hybrid or bridging solutions to connect to other protocols, like Nostr with e.g. Minds.com, and AT Protocol (e.g. Bluesky's) with e.g. Wafrn, Friendica, NeoDB and/or @[email protected].
• Usefulness still being sown, but given contents need to propagate for them to be seen locally in ActivityPub, maybe keep an eye at the tool from this post? (if the post doesn't load for you locally, search for the link at https://sh.itjust.works/search)

Hope this helps. =)

When TikTok first went down in the states I joined rednote like a lot of tt users did. It was really neat at the start seeing into the lives of Chinese citizens.

After about a week everything was "welcome TikTok refugees" and things had changed too much.

WHYYYYY

Because social media platforms are systems subject to network effect. The value of one increases as something like the square of the userbase, which means that it's hard to displace incumbents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

In economics, a network effect (also called network externality or demand-side economies of scale) is the phenomenon by which the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products. Network effects are typically positive feedback systems, resulting in users deriving more and more value from a product as more users join the same network. The adoption of a product by an additional user can be broken into two effects: an increase in the value to all other users (total effect) and also the enhancement of other non-users' motivation for using the product (marginal effect).[1]

Network effects can be direct or indirect. Direct network effects arise when a given user's utility increases with the number of other users of the same product or technology, meaning that adoption of a product by different users is complementary.[2] This effect is separate from effects related to price, such as a benefit to existing users resulting from price decreases as more users join. Direct network effects can be seen with social networking services, including Twitter, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and LinkedIn; telecommunications devices like the telephone; instant messaging services such as MSN, AIM or QQ;[3] or even Wikipedia itself.

This doesn’t feel casual haha