As you probably know from the sidebar this site was started by moderators from the r/futurology subreddit, and some of us moderate both. We initially thought most of the site’s growth would come via Reddit, but it hasn’t happened that way. Our main instance - c/futurology - gets most of its subscribers from elsewhere in the fediverse. Despite several attempts with pinned posts that a few thousand people have read, only 20% of our userbase joined from Reddit.
We don’t want to spam the subreddit user base, but we have access to things like pinned posts and comments to promote this site.
We’d like to grow subscriber numbers for here from Reddit. Any ideas as to how to do this more successfully than we have previously?
I wouldn’t put the decentralization aspect of Lemmy in the spotlight as its implementation has signifficant flaws. Lemmy hides posts and comments from users in defederated instances even if they’re posted on communities that would be otherwise visible, and this makes the optimal behavior for visibility be that of creating accounts in every instance you’re posting to.
The previous accounts i’ve used on this instance, RA2lover@burggit.moe and RA2lover@kbin.burggit.moe, had far less activity on posts/comments compared to posts/comments made by others at similar times, because the instances they were from were defederated by nearly all lemmy instances over accepting lolicon. This issue was bad enough to be one of the reasons that made them leave Lemmy entirely.