So, with news of Reddit making deals to sell user data for AI training, I think we should really start organizing ourselves for an effective migration campaign.
I believe one of the (many) reasons that the summer protests failed was its lack of focus. There was an overall idea of “going dark” as an attempt to get Reddit to backtrack on some of its decisions, but once they double down on their decision there was no followup and creation of a credible threat, so only the more strong-willed really stuck by their principles and left reddit, the majority just shrugged it off and went back to their niche communities.
This long tail of niche communities is Reddit’s biggest strength. There are plenty of places where people can find general news or share memes, but there is only one place that can connect people with its many different interests. This is why so many of you surely went to Reddit, despite our best efforts to bring enough people around here.
So, how about we change the strategy? If the general “spray and pray” approach only managed to bring 0.008% of Reddit’s userbase to Lemmy, how about we put our focus on bring as many people as possible from a single one?
We should look into a subreddit with the following characteristcs:
- Not too big in size, around 100k - 300k subscribers.
- Still fairly active.
- Very specific in focus. Ideally, it would be a local community, but we could also think of a not-so popular subreddit dedicated to a niche hobby.
- The moderators of the subreddit need to be willing to participate, and follow through with the migration. That means, they need to keep promoting the Lemmy alternative until our corresponding community is at least as big as the Reddit one.
I’m thinking one potential candidate would be /r/adelaide (158k subscribers, multiple posts per day) but I haven’t talked with any of the moderators so I don’t know how that would go. (Any admins from aussie.zone that could chime in?) Of course, this is just an idea and if any would you think of another sub that could also work better we can talk about it. The important thing is not to spend too much time worrying on what subreddit we are going to push, just that we need to choose one and only one.
Once we find a subreddit that fits the bill, then our efforts go to supporting the subscribers to help them find a client, setup their account, subscribe to the new community and unsubscribe from the subreddit.
We don’t even need to encourage them to leave Reddit altogether, we just need to get them to go through the motions of setting up Lemmy for one community. I think if we do that, it will be a lot easier to keep us all focused on the goal, the overall network effects won’t be such a problem and the coming users will be more likely to stick.
This is already a wall of text, and I’m sure there will be plenty of people who will shoot this idea down for numerous reasons, but overall I really haven’t given up hope on the Fediverse as the future of the Internet. We just need to work a bit for it.
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As much as I love Lemmy, it’s just honestly not ready for another big influx yet. The 0.19 update broke so much, it really brought home how precarious this whole thing still is. Those of us who are here either a) kind of enjoy the jank because it feels like an adventure b) were morally outraged enough to make a stand against Reddit or c) both.
I have a very small amount of influence in the niche community of fibre crafts and especially cross stitch. Would I be able to explain Lemmy to my audience in a way that made sense and that they might even want to try out? Absolutely. Would I actually do that until it’s a bit more stable? Absolutely not, apart from a couple of specific individuals that I’m already working on.
Trying to force people to join platform B when platform A is already serving their needs makes no sense. You need to find the people who are dissatisfied, the people that would actually benefit from trying something new, and then make sure they’re aware of the option.
Don’t get me wrong through, I do encourage people to learn about and dip their toes into the Fediverse in general. Just last week I convinced a wave of fibre crafters (often older ladies who have barely ever ventured outside of Facebook) to try out Mastodon and Pixelfed and some of them have really taken to it! Alt text and content warnings and everything! One or two fellow YouTubers are even setting up PeerTube channels to bring over more crafting content.
Why did I tell them to join Mastodon over Lemmy? I’m literally moderator of !knitting@lemmy.world and !lemmy_stitch@sh.itjust.works so surely it’s in my best interests to bring them over here?
No. I know the demographic, I know what they’re annoyed about with big social media, and I thought Mastodon / Pixelfed were the best replacements for them.
As much as we would all love to see Lemmy become huge, you have to meet people where they’re at. If Lemmy is genuinely the best choice for everyone who is currently in /r/adelaide or whatever, then brilliant, your strategy makes sense. But if it’s not actually in their best interests, if they’re just going to be annoyed by things breaking and not see enough value to make it worthwhile, then there’s no point doing it just because you wish Lemmy was bigger.
Maybe the moral of this story is that the real strategy you want to be looking at is getting tiny niche influencers on side! 😄
>kind of enjoy the jank because it feels like an adventure
you know me better than i knew myself. are you taking clients?
I’m not sure what you’re on about. For me, reddit is “that thing that shows up in searches where I get the cached page” and not part of my life at all.
I didn’t even bother to delete my posts. Fuck 'em. Let the bot be trained on me correcting halfwits who don’t know e-mail isn’t pluralized with an S or trying to get people to grow up about development and security. It seems the only thing their bots will get from me is better spelling and an aversion to flatpak.
If you wanna go on reddit and recommend a single Lemmy discussion as the answer to their problem, then do it. It’s like linking to a stackOverflow answer. Maybe they’ll stay once they find out it’s different here. Cool.
I’m okay with it not being a movement. I’m glad I left reddit, like I was glad to leave its predecessors for reddit. I can hope for a long existence on the fediverse. Maybe we can be a good place for people to go, and we not try to think for them, okay? We know we’re right and we came to that conclusion oirselves, so let others do the same.
I’ll probably feel differently about it in a month, but right now this is like paddling against the tide.
A very good idea! https://startrek.website/ took this approach, it’d be intersting to check in with them to see what they learned.
One of the big disadvantages we have is that we’re still somewhat under-developed, due to being newish still, alongside not having corporate-levels of resources to pour into development.
This leaves us open to things like the recent spam flood. These things will get ironed out over time, but until they do, they’ll inevitably harm the platform’s growth.
In just the past 6 months though, apps have rolled out and steadily improved, some security issues have been addressed, and larger communities have built-out their admin capacity. So, we’re approaching being primed for growth, but that recent spam flood took me aback for a second.
You want to make a strong first impression, since it carries a lot of influence and you only get one shot. So, before we really do heavy campaigning to try to draw people, we want to make sure they’ll have a good experience while they’re here. I think we’re close, but not quite there yet.
Progress has been steady and overall positive though. One thing I think that gets underestimated is the importance of the size of our body of old content, and how much it helps to grow that. The meme communities having pages and pages of memes to scroll, the news communities having articles on everything in triplicate, the tech communities having thousands of interesting old convos to look at, the art communities being crammed full of art, etc etc.
That body of old stuff ends up being a kind of bedrock that future users will be more interested in building off of. Then the niche communities will start to pop more imo.
In a funny way the spam flood has helped lemmy if anything. The maintainers are finally addressing mod tools, and a few mod bots have matured enough to be able to run. I agree, short term it’s not great, but the script kiddies over in Japan I think ended up helping lemmy more than hurting it
I believe one of the (many) reasons that the summer protests failed was its lack of focus.
Did the protests enact meaningful material change? No, and by that metric they failed. However I don’t think they failed at changing the status quo in terms of what people think is possible and what they will try as an alternative to corporate social media.
I am not trying to take away from your point but I won’t let us bash ourselves for failing here when I consider it a massive victory that is going to lead to many more victories.
If we think of “reddit caved” as the only condition then yes it failed. If we add in others like “content providers left” and “quality of content dropped”, then from what I read that is true. So they stained their name pretty badly, and I’m happy enough with that. And hey, it brought us here
@rglullis Please dont’ call it the “Threadiverse” the biggest advantage of Lemmy/kbin/mbin is ActivityPub and the fediverse. Particularly the IDEAS behind the fediverse and Free Software more generally. The fact I’m reading this and commenting from Friendica is so much better than the old days. Just like reddit was a big step from a content perspective than a bunch of isolated forums, so the fediverse is the next step. Yes its been around for at least a decade (though some would say longer by clinging to XMPP/Jabber and even e-mail being part of the feidverse) but the fediverse is still in its infancy.
Sorry, not willing to engage in sophistry. If you can participate in the discussion from friendica, more power to you, but at the end of the day it’s a lot easier to get people to use something if they understand the practical applications instead of the underlying definitions of the protocol. We need to put our marketer hats for this one.
@rglullis Unless you are part of a hosting company trying to sell server space, which according to the homepage of communick.news maybe you are, we don’t need a marketing hat on. What you are calling “success” has 0 impact on the actual mission of lemmy.
I feel kind of silly talking about “mission”, even more so when talking about a tool. What is “the actual mission of Lemmy”?
But let’s say that you are talking about the mission of the people working on the project. Do you think that something as crucial as our online communication networks should be majorly controlled by corporations? If you are using friendica, I guess you don’t share that opinion, right?
And if you don’t share that opinion, do you think that this “as long as I am out, I don’t care about the others” approach is effective? I think that the best way to ensure that we get to have a corporate-free internet, we need to work as hard as possible to make that the reality of the majority, not just a niche thing.
And yes, Communick is a commercial provider, but you got the order wrong. I created Communick to help me to achieve this goal of having open systems available to everyone, making money and having Communick growing is a means, not an end. And quite frankly, Communick has been nothing but a money pit. I’m still running it because I’m stubborn. If I just cared about money I’d be working at Google.
@rglullis Any project has a mission statement. or they should if they want their project to maintain for any lenghth of time. Lemmy is started by marxist-lennists, so I suspect their mission is related to trying to establisxh a marxist-lenninst society and anything that doesn’t step towards achieving that goal probably isn’t needed by the project. Establishing clear and understanable mission statements, and a way to update them if necessary, is a great way to tell when the right time to Fork a project is. There is certainly the niche way of doing it just because you can, like owning an AR-15, but that probably doesn’t have great utility. I’m certainly not going to feed my family with an AK, and no one is going to use my poorly (read not at all) maintained fork of GNU Social.
I’m a Libertarian, so I have no objection to corporations controlling networks. At this point in history I don’t see any reliable way for worker-cooperatives, private individuals, etc. to do so. But I’ve been a GNU evangelist my entire adult life. If Facebook ran on Free Software rather than closed source proprietary software, backed up by the force of governments, I’d be much more comfortable using it.
One of the great things about #Fediverse, or more accurately ActivityPub, like email before it (or more accurately POP, SMTP, etc.) is that there isn’t a network to control. #FreedomsTheAnswer
