System rebooted after running tests and doing a backup, and yep, that solved both issues! Ahhh the frontpage looks so much better.

That was a tiny bit nerve-racking lol. I'm in tech but don't usually deal with production systems in my line of work.

Crunching hard to catch up on work today. Getting this place up and running put me in deficit. But I'm planning to post an update sticky to the main sub towards the end of the week. So if you have any input, please do put it in the site direction post before about Friday!

Thank god... I've finally passed my kidney stone of a project. It's not totally done but all of the hard bits are done. Just writing things up and sending it out now.

Literally lost 3-4kg in stress and missed meals / sleep. But I think we have something that might be worth it. Having a very career defining kind of year.

What'd I miss??

I know what you mean on the former point. I am concerned about retention too. But I'd say we have achieved a minimum bar of success at this point! If there is a sudden scattering from reddit, we have proven that our community is absolutely capable of setting up shop here. Posters, readers, regulars, everyone.

So we have built the boat! Before reddit there were lots of cosy forums across the internet. In the worst case, we can be one of them. We won't lose the group we've created together.

Re: Direction: I don't have one clear answer yet, but here is my thinking so far:

• There is very strong evidence that Malaysians want a national forum all to themselves – lowyat.net.
• I have long felt r/my has limits which prevent it from fully serving in this role. Malaysia has such diverse languages, cultures, religions, activities, everything. It's hard to fit this into a single subreddit (e.g. we can't have Chinese discussion)
• But while lowyat.net is very impressive, it's run on a structure / codebase / ideas which are 20 years old (phpbb). The community is shaped and limited by this fact, e.g. they can't have deeply threaded discussions.
• Perhaps this is an opportunity to create a thing which serves a similar role to lowyat, but is much more thoughtful about its impact and role in the Malaysian online ecosystem?
• The r/my team seems to have figured out how to create a warm and cosy community, that also serves as a force for good.
  • Like mediating racism and controversy instead of steering into it, and signal-boosting stuff that benefits the IRL Malaysian community.
  • E.g. if you do a quick Fermi estimate via our pageview counts, I suspect @[email protected] may literally be the most impactful teacher in Malaysia right now, via her SPM support. Consider the effect of slightly better career and university decisions across each student's entire lifespan. (And similarly, u/snel may be the most impactful counselor)

Sorry for the wall of text! This was a good exercise to get some thinking on paper. What do you think as well?

I am seeing people starting to develop automod scripts. I hope to have one available to use soon!

Also hmm back on retention –

• I'm wondering what we can do to keep a candle burning over here when the main sub comes back online. Would love to hear ideas.
• So far, the best idea I have is that there is content we can offer here which is hard to get on r/my
• Chinese / Tamil / Jawi language support is definitely one thing. But I'm not sure what else at this stage.
• Maybe we can point people here for specialised content which we're normally forced to remove, such as job boards, buying and selling, dating, promoting local arts and business...

Hmmmm. Perhaps we should start a discussion post for this meta / strategy stuff somewhere, and put it on the sidebar.

Yep all of the above. We don't have a .my domain name or host and it's cheap to keep running. I'm sponsoring this initial period but if this becomes an ongoing thing we'll probably figure out donations or something, so the community can properly own the server. It's real cheap though, honestly

And who says I'm hosting anything? Psh it's all @admin. He's a good dude. He lives in Svalborgia.

Leftover roast pork on toast. Itttt's crunch time!

At work I mean. Not the pork. The crackling is completely floppy :<

Oh hey, it looks like image uploading works now! But they've added this silly new "feature" where it complains if your image is too high resolution, instead of just resizing it for you. The max size allowed seems to be 1MB.

So you might say you had... llaollaosai?

Electrolytes always help me a ton when my gut is off. Feel better soon!

After reading the Lemmy guide more carefully, I think we have way more users than I thought yesterday:

• I think the 1.62k users are locally registered users, not federated users! This means we're actually growing steadily by about 20-30 local registrations a day. (Yesterday we were at 1.6k, day before at 1.57k, etc.)
• The 67 users/week is the number of users who have posted or commented within the last week. There are way more users registered, but they're lurking.
• This lines up with r/malaysia! Over there we have 360k subscribers and 6.4m views per month, but popular posts generally get 1k upvotes. So a huge proportion of the sub lurks and never even upvotes.
• This gives me hope that we can build this into something that will survive the long haul. We've built a nice community together on r/my and it'd suck to lose it if reddit declined.
• Hello lurkers! :)

Oh, tagging @[email protected] and @[email protected] since we were talking about this yesterday.

Open offer: If anyone writes a script that uses this API to do something useful for monyet.cc, and you can pack it up as a cronjob + python file, we'd be happy to host it for you!

Please get it working and stable on your own machine before handing it to us though. Since this is untrusted python code we have to review your script manually, and I don't want to be doing a million little code reviews...

Thanks for asking guise! It's cheap, Lemmy is written to be very resource efficient! Domain is USD10/y, hosting is about USD20/month.

And hosting is actually overprovisioned and could probably be USD5-10/month. I got a slightly bigger VM just in case (2 CPUs, 2GB RAM). But I'm seeing CPU % at 2.5% with just one spike to 10% in the last day. RAM holding steady at 52%.

Zero issues covering costs for this experimental stage btw! We don't know how this will go yet. And things have been good career wise lately. But yeah if we start seeing real traffic and need to pay for big boy servers, we may need to figure out something with the community!

Testing username tagging. @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] (garr why doesn't this work!?)

Switching to "All" mode is not a bad reddit replacement imo!

On my feed literally right now: Why all of a sudden tech companies are not being favorable to their users? lol

Harr work is so crunchy right now. Currently rushing to publish some research paper. Very exciting but it always takes way more time than you plan for (even when you know it takes longer time than you plan for)

If you sent me a message and are wondering why I ghosted

ima catch up later in the week, I swear :<

We made a fix on the backend, if your pics weren't uploading before they should be working now!

My slightly off timezone lunch today is very brown. Nandos plus assorted fridge contents. I need something healthy hmm. Any tasty ideas?

Extra context on posting limits - we've previously reached out 1-1 to our regular news posters and made this request (thanks @stormy001 and @imaginelizard!). Some of you may remember when the frontpage was mostly 0-comment newsposts. But this seems like a good time to make this more general and public.

We don't like it either, but this is strictly temporary. Please bear with us while the frontpage algorithm is improved!

Upgrade complete, we're now on 0.18.1! Feedback welcome if you run into bugs and bad behavior!

One more thanks for the shoutout! That seems have created a noticeable traffic bump. Welcome, fediverse visitors!

Thanks for the detailed thinking!! Btw to other readers, the way we work on the admin team is to actively invite disagreement, so that we get to see more angles, so that we can make better decisions. (That's why we ask for feedback all the time too!)

User acquisition vs user retention

• I think much of your comments are around user retention.
  • I 100% agree that retention is a big and real problem we have. E.g. I'm hearing lots of complaints about how hard it is to get into Lemmy (esp with 0.17.4 and the crap app support).
  • In fact, this is an excellent point: I'll start thinking about how to get us some retention metrics (% new users who end up sticking around)
• That said, most of these measures are aimed at solving a separate but related problem, which is user acquisition – creating sources of new users to balance churn:
  • Everyone who is here got here either through a r/malaysia sticky or the lemmyverse.
  • The problem I'm seeing is that retention will never be 100%. There will always be a churn rate, where some % of users leave every week.
  • Example: If our churn rate is 5% of users per week (say that's 10 users), and our retention rate is 10%, every week we must convince 100 users to come try us, or else our active userbase shrinks!
  • That's why I'm hoping to create funnels which attract eyeballs from r/my (theme weeks) and the lemmyverse (!Malaysia) on a regular basis, even if we don't keep most of them.
• User acquisition and retention work hand-in-hand though.
  • There's no point driving millions of users here if keep zero because the site sucks
  • But if the site is great but we don't have regular flows of new users, churn will kill us in a few months just the same :(
• Thinking about your input has been very clarifying btw. I completely agree that we need get much better at user retention too. I'll stew on this.

monyet.cc's value proposition

• IMO, the question we don't have clear answers to yet is, what makes users stick around in the long term?
• I think the theory you're going on is that building a warmer and livelier cafe will do it
  • This might be true, we all love !cafe :)
  • My concern is that what we're doing there "competes" directly with r/my's daily thread, r/mys, and LYN's kopitiam.
  • So this might not be enough to convince users to stick around just by itself. We may need to offer some other differentiation.
  • Most of us early users are committed to the idea of building a new colony. But normies get their value in other ways!
• The other theory I have is that some users may stick around if we have (a) "deep" feeds of local content they can't get on r/my and r/mys (Malaysian dating, hobbies, investment), which are (b) structured in a way that they can't get on LYN (best content upvoted, deeply threaded discussions)
  • This is totally untested as well, but IMO it's worth testing. Because if true, this is an untapped resource that we can build on.
  • For example, if we have a strong !cars community, every car obsessive we remove from r/malaysia for Rule 3 can be sent here to grow the site
• This is definitely still an open question though, I think the only way to find out is to run the experiments!
  • But more thinking and ideas are super welcome so we can keep sharpening as we go!

!Malaysia

• Hmm yeah, we still need more clarity on how to use this. E.g. I just figured out that like on reddit, crossposting splits the comment sections :(
• But there's super strong evidence that this is an important acquisition funnel - have a look at the community lists by size: lemmy.ca, aussie.zone, feddit.uk
• I don't think it's an accident that all three have a !Country community at the top. I suspect what is happening here is that many Fediverse / Lemmyverse users already have a home base elsewhere (e.g. on lemmy.world), but want a single !Country sub from us, that they can add to their feed
• And if we can get on users' feeds, that's a gateway to our other communities!