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.
The one thing you’re missing is a REASON for people to migrate to Lemmy. Network effect is a thing, and people won’t move against it unless they have a good reason. If decentralization is important to you then it’s easy to make the case for Lemmy and the Fediverse, but if not then these migration campaigns will just come off as annoying and like some kind of cult or fandom for an obscure alternative platform.
I mean think about it, from the perspective of an average Reddit user you are trying to lure away people from an established community to your own platform, breaking the existing community in two in the process. They will only support this if they think the trouble of going through a migration will be worth it, and the community has a good chance to completly reform on the new platform. They just won’t come unless you can convince them that that’s actually the case.
I also have my doubts with the approach of migrating one mid-sized community at a time. I get the idea that you want to build a lively community around a topic here, to make it worth people’s time to participate. But people are usually part of more than one community, and I think they’ll only migrate for good if MOST or at least a good portion of the communities they care about are well represented here. It’s a textbook chicken-and-egg problem. But it might end up being better than other approaches, so maybe it’s worth a try!
The reality is that we have the network effect and centralization efficiency stacked against us, and there is no magic plan that will make those go away. Imo the best things we can do are focusing on building and forstering our own communities here, thinking about how to create value that centralized and monetized platforms cannot easily replicate, and being on the lookout for opportunities like the Reddit protests to trigger migation waves.
This is an excellent point. My benchmark for something like this is, “What would cause my wife to migrate from Reddit to Lemmy?” The answer is a Digg-level fiasco where the majority of users leave.
Those of us who already swore off Reddit in favor of this platform are vastly the exception. Most people follow the herd when it comes to social media.
That said, as much as I’d love to see a larger userbase and more active niche communities here, I’m quite happy with our incremental growth. The fediverse feels a lot more like the community of the early internet, which is something I really missed.
Actively developped, ad-free mobile clients.
I know everyone on Reddit uses the Revanced Sync or Boost, hopefully at some point they won’t work due to technical changes and the awfulness of the Reddit app will lead people here
For the moderators, the story to tell it’s easy: they are in abusive relationship with Reddit’s management, and they are being offered a way out.
For the non-affected users, we can also find a very good reason: money.
Reddit is going to IPO soon, right? Let’s get the WallstreetBets people involved, and let’s show how people could make money by shorting Reddit’s stock.
Moderators are taken advantage of, but they also get a free platform to host their community, and they can always step down if they want to. Most apparently have no issue playing by Reddit’s rules, and therefore have no immediate need to switch to another platform.
I don’t think the typical Reddit user cares much about shorting Reddit stock to make some money, they just want to talk and be entertained.
Those are things YOU care about and would motivate you to move, not the Reddit users you are trying to convince.
It’s silly to dismiss a whole thesis based based on your concept of “typical” or “average” anything when the whole idea is to find and reach outliers in a large population.
Sorry for the personal callout, but are you always this negative? It seems like every comment or thread you participate is only to see how much you can put people down. Can you please at least try to see how it could work instead of spreading misery everywhere?
I thought the whole idea is to make entire communities migrate to Lemmy, and obviously those that don’t yet have enough incentive to make the switch, no? You’ll need to convince the majority of users in those communities then, and that means just catering to some outliers won’t cut it.
I’m not negative, I just try to think about how it might play out based on my understanding of how things work. Should I tell you how great your idea is instead, even though I think it has some major shortcomings?
I’m sorry, maybe you’re not used to this kind of critizism. I’m not saying it can’t work, I just bring up things that I think are problems, so you can take them into account and decide if you agree or not. As I said, I do think it’s worth trying.
Not entire communities. One. I’m saying let’s find one subreddit (out of the 100k+ subreddits that exist) that could be interesting and let’s focus our efforts on solving the problems of this one community.
I don’t mind criticism, I do mind getting sidetracked with arguments and objections that are not related to the proposal. When you start arguing for something beyond the idea of finding one subreddit, it feels like a drag.
So? You still need to convince the people of that community that it’s a good idea, or do you think they will just follow a handful of mods blindly?
Idk what you think critisism is, but imo it’s mainly arguments and objections about things you might not have thought about. It’s fine if you don’t agree with them, but maybe don’t ask for criticism and then lash out when it’s not what you wanted to hear.
Even the longest of the journeys start with a single step.
You are right, we need to find a mod that is willing to do it.
Then we need to work on how to message it for the redditors
Then we need to collect feedback and see what is working and what needs improvement.
Then we need to improve the existing Lemmy clients, because onboarding is still messy. I’d like to make a “friendly” fork of Voyager which can use my “login with Reddit” system to auto-migrate users, but if the main dev doesn’t want to accept, I guess I will have to manage the fork myself.
Then we will need to improve the existing servers, because we are not really ready for 100-200k active users.
Then we will need to find a way to save on resources, because the new version of Lemmy is a hog.
Then…
Then…
Then…
I know it’s a lot of work, but it makes no sense to let be taken by anxiety and just looking at everything that needs to be done. I’m just asking for you to look at the first step.
This is not about taking the first step, this is about what direction to pick in the first place. You proposed one, I (and others) pointed out what might be problems with it. If you still think it’s the best course of action then by all means go forward with it. Just be mindful that you can also do harm if you overdo do it, like giving Lemmy a bad rep by trying too hard to convince people to switch. Or … you know … creating a million bots or something.