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! 😄
Thank you for what you are doing, it’s great!
I kind of agree that Lemmy is still too rough around the edges. Sublinks, piefed.social and Mbin seem to progress fast, hopefully one of those can emerge as a better alternative
I keep seeing mentions of this piefed thing but don’t actually know what it is, better do some research before a curious knitter asks me and my illusion of expertise is shattered!
But yeah, we’ll see. I have no particular horse in the race of which underlying software is running things, but as soon as one of them is a valuable option for my crafty friends they’ll certainly hear all about it.
Here you go: https://piefed.social/
One of their cool features is topics, such as this one that should interest you: https://piefed.social/topic/arts-craft
That’s just my Lemmy subscription feed but with extra AI “art” lol. But thanks, always interesting to learn about the up-and-comers. I wonder if we’ll end up in an endless forking situation like with Misskey 🍿
endless forking situation like with Misskey
As ironic as it seems, I would be happy to see this as it would mean Lemmy has enough devs so that different forks can be worked on at the same time
The more the merrier, indeed!
>kind of enjoy the jank because it feels like an adventure
you know me better than i knew myself. are you taking clients?
We were born too late to explore the globe or pioneer new settlements, but dammit we can try out weird new online platforms and nobody can stop us!
Hey sorry I don’t know the story with the 0.19, do you have a link I could read please?
There is no link summarizing the whole thing, but if you browse the meta communities of a few instances and look for threads in December, you should see people complaining about federation being broken.
One good example is !europe@feddit.de that wasn’t federated for a few weeks
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
Exactly. “What doesn’t kills us makes us stronger”.
I agree on the importance of content, but I do not worry about “only one shot of making a good impression”. People are willing to turn a blind eye for the things they want to work out - in Brazil orkut (remember that?) was so successful that the “server error” due to overload page a meme in itself. Twitter’s “Fail Whale” as well.
This is why the idea is to focus on one single subreddit, and why we need the support from their moderators. If we successfully turn this into a mission for the community, then all of the missteps can be forgiven and used as lessons of what not to do in in the next one.
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.
It failed in the sense that Reddit still not just got what it wanted, it was a test that showed that most people don’t really care about the nature of social media and tech companies, as long as their precious content is still provided. It certainly emboldened to go ahead with their plans of IPO and on monetizing user data.
I’m not saying we should bash ourselves. Trying and failing is certainly better than subjugating to the status quo out of apathy. But Lemmy is stuck at 35k MAU, which Reddit is one of the “smaller” social networks and still counts 400 *million MAU. I wouldn’t call a “massive victory” if we only managed to reach 0.01% of the userbase, and it’s not even like the people here completely got rid of Reddit, a good number of them are still quite active there.
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
We gotta see this as the victory it was.
We made a real impact on a landscape dominated by companies with more cash on hand than entire countries with almost zero budget and the equivalent of maybeeee 100 semi-full time developers, imagine what we can do with more resources and more development time behind the fediverse?
The truth is corporations have zero ability to push social networks into the future where they desperately need to go without violating their basic profit model, everything they are promising right now is either hot air or simply trying to get out in front of regulatory bodies like the EU.
We have no such limitations on our ability to craft the future and thus any speed we grow and innovate at is infinitely faster than Silicon Valley can on a medium term scale.
I’m a moderator of r/LinuxHardware on reddit. It has 76k subscribers, and receives about 150k unique pageviews per month.
After using Lemmy for a while and loving it, I decided to officially have a presence here, and partnered with the owner of !linuxhardware@lemmy.ml (Liam from GamingOnLinux) to have it be the official lemmy community.
I then wrote a post that I pinned in the community describing how to move to lemmy (as well as including a link to your Fediverser thing :D), and added a Fediverse section in the sidebar directing people here.
Unfortunately, it never really seemed to get much traction in the community, which also happened to vote not to remain dark after the API change a few months ago.
If I had to estimate how many followed through and came to lemmy, I would hazard a guess at around 30 to 50-ish people, based on the quick subscriber growth on the lemmy community, but that may have just been from already existing lemmings subbing from my announcement post at the time.
When I have the time, I’ll try writing up a call to action referencing Reddit’s announcement that they will sell their data to AI companies.
Also, one community that may be more receptive specifically to switching due to their data being sold is r/Privacy. I made a comment about lemmy there calling for people to leave for greener pastures, and it seemed to get a good amount of upvotes. But it is a large one, so it may not be the best ‘target’ for converting.
Thank you for this
What do you think about the idea of having the fediverser bots mirroring the subreddit content into the lemmy community? It would help both to bootstrap the lemmy community and also showcase the migration tool.
Have reddit data dump sublemmys named like c/r_linuxhardware which is periodically updated, no commenting or posting ability.
Number one issue is to be able to actually look up accumulated linuxhardware content without reddit.
The thing is that fediverser (my project for mirroring content and to help people migrate) can work transparently with the actual Lemmy community. No need to create separate communities and then getting people to subscribe to two separate things.
Im not sure. Wouldn’t it annoy you to have a bunch of discussions in your c/linuxhardware feed you cant really take part in because they are imported?
We dont want to make it feel lile a lurker botfed feed either. Separate it so people know it is there if they want to query for important info. You can crosspost if you want.
We can turn the mirror into a bridge, and make the conversation two-way. And even if we didn’t, you can take part anyway because there will be (hopefully) an increasing number of people there who are actually native to Lemmy.
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Is there progress on making conversations between Reddit and Lemmy 2-way? I think for LinuxHardware specifically, that feature would be somewhat essential before implementing fediverser bots, since a lot (if not most) of the content posted there are requests for advice and questions, and I can’t help but feel it would be off-putting for the lemmy community if they were responding to OP’s that can’t respond back, especially if the comments were asking for further information before making a recommendation.
I will be honest with you, I haven’t put much work on Fediverser since December for two reasons:
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I haven’t come up with a design that is simple enough for the Lemmy users to indicate how they want their message replicated to Reddit (i.e, should the response be sent as a comment, as a DM, none at all?)
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Time taken by job search and building more stuff in Communick to try to generate income. I applied to NLNet for a grant for Fediverser, and it’s being evaluated. If I get it, then I’ll be able to focus again on it, but if not I will be even more pressured to find some other way to make money.
Hey man, no worries. I should mention that I massively appreciate the effort and time you’ve put toward it already.
Regarding the design issue, I would put forward that it should only have the ability to respond to comments for simplicity’s sake, since the need for DM’s would be relatively niche, I suspect. And if the goal is to have a bridge between two communities, replicating all messages to reddit and vice versa by default would, IMO, be the only mode required.
I hope you’re able to secure some solid income soon! 🤞
since the need for DM’s would be relatively niche
Do you think so? I’d personally would prefer to not have any comments in the public threads. So, I’d like my comments to be sent as DMs to the OP just to let them know about the conversation on Lemmy and to encourage them to signup here. Don’t forget that the main goal is to make it easy for people to migrate away from Reddit. If we just implement a two-way bridge, we’d be effectively giving no incentive for Redditors to move out.
I feel like having comments in public threads would provide the most visibility/advertising for lemmy on reddit while simultaneously providing more content to interact with on the lemmy side, which is the most critical aspect needed over here, IMHO.
Setting up a bridge to DM the OP to inform them that a lemmy discussion on his post exists and imploring them to join doesn’t really offer a compelling reason to join, because that just shows them that even if they keep posting on reddit exclusively, they’ll get that benefit of Lemmy discussions coming in as DMs anyway, so why switch? And anyone participating in the Reddit thread normally would not even know that a lemmy discussion is happening.
If every comment in the lemmy thread bridged to the reddit thread, along with an automated message at the bottom that said something like ‘Posted from Lemmy’ with a hyperlink to the discussion on lemmy, I think that would intrigue the lurkers and commenters as well as the OP.
I think the goal for two-way communication is to show potential converts that they can choose to come to lemmy without having to log into reddit to keep up with their favorite communities, so the value-add is that they’re not missing out on anything, and they can join lemmy if they prefer it.
Realistically (for the average redditor anyway), lemmy doesn’t offer any compelling reason to use it over reddit unless you find the concept ideologically appealing already, or prefer the ‘village’ aspect that these smaller, more focused communities bring (those are the reasons I joined, personally). So I think it makes more sense to just try to bridge them to maximize activity here, which would (I assume anyway), encourage growth.
But that’s just my 2 cents. :)
My thesis is that content is king. There is a good number of people who are on Reddit not because it’s their favorite platform, but because they can’t find the content elsewhere.
If we mirror the content on Lemmy, then Lemmy will have the same content as Reddit, then the “lack of content elsewhere” stops being a problem, and then these people will be “free agents”.
If we have content here, the “problems” of Lemmy are not going to be seen in such a bad light. Conversely, if Reddit does not have exclusivity of the content, people are not going to feel the need to put up with all their crap.
Having a “two-way” bridge is not necessarily bad, but the more we have people saying “look, someone responded <quote original comment> on <lemmy community>, to respond, signup via <link to fediverser migration tool>” it will start creating a situation where people will be realize that they can choose between:
- staying on reddit, to see reddit content, deal with Reddit management and being periodically pointed to more content on Lemmy.
- create an account on Lemmy, see all of the content from Reddit + Lemmy, free from Reddit management.
I am treating those in the “I will be annoyed by a bot asking me to migrate” as “people who are loyal to Reddit and not willing to move away”, so the sooner they block the bridge, the better for everyone. But again, my thesis is that these people are not so numerous as the ones that will just move to the platform that provides them the most content.
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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.
The one thing you’re missing is a REASON for people to migrate to Lemmy.
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.
Most moderators apparently…
I don’t think the typical Reddit user cares much about shorting.
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?
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.
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.
Sorry for the personal callout, but are you always this negative?
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?
Can you please at least try to see how it could work instead of spreading misery everywhere?
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.
I thought the whole idea is to make entire communities migrate to Lemmy
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.
Not entire communities. One.
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?
I don’t mind criticism, I do mind getting sidetracked with arguments and objections that are not related to the proposal.
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.
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?
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.
I wish people would stop using this silly term “Threadiverse”. There is no fundamental difference between Lemmy, Mastodon, Peertube, Friendica and so on. They all federate with the same protocol and are all part of the same Fediverse.
But the protocol is the least important thing, it’s the applications that come out of it.
Granted, I think it would be an improvement if we didn’t have to care or think about what server you are using and people could keep their same identity regardless of the application they are using.
Yeah, it would be nice if I could keep my “communick.com” handle everywhere, but my usage and conversations on Lemmy are different from when I am on Mastodon. The audiences are different. It’s a good example of The medium is the message.
The problem is that “Threadiverse” is almost never used together with “Fediverse”, so anyone unfamiliar with the terms will think that they are totally distinct. I can understand if you want to categorize different platforms within the Fediverse, but then we should also start referring to Mastodon and similar projects as the “Tootiverse”.
but then we should also start referring to Mastodon and similar projects as the “Tootiverse”.
I’ve seen Mastoverse used a few times to describe Mastodon, Misskey and it’s forks, and that part of Kbin. I guess as more and more comparison will emerge between the Threadiverse and the microblogging part of the Fediverse, a new name will emerge, and ideally platform neutral
How can people on Lemmy follow Mastodon accounts?
I spotted some groups on Mastodon, but even those I can’t subscribe to (it’s stuck on Pending)
Indeed, but I was talking about personal accounts, not groups.
That’s how both kind of platforms mostly differ
I was adding onto your issue with another one (even groups, which match up with communities, can’t be followed)
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.
I think that you would first want to have people using both services and annoyances/problems with one service will cause people to abandon the lousy place to use the better place.
That being said, the Lemmy instance I registered to had broken federation approximately half the time and was down for significantly long amounts of time as well. People interacting there had their comments take a long time to federate (only catching up during the rare times federation would work) and they had no idea that they were shouting into a closed box during that time. I’m not even addressing other federation issues such as this instance being blocked by another instance (Beehaw) which is causing some fragmentation.
Lemmy likes to emphasize that you should register for smaller instances and not with larger ones. This “spreads out the load”. You can create your community there as well. You then run into the “annoyances/problems” relating to your smaller instance and migrate to a more stable option… which is Reddit which you still use.
So while federation is a strength for Lemmy, it is also a weakness when it doesn’t work. Migrating people to Lemmy doesn’t tend to focus on migration to a specific server (like lemmy.world ) but focuses instead on migration to “Lemmy” which can be any random server under the sun (stable or not, reliable or overloaded, federating reliably or not). Once issues come up, the person could move to another Lemmy server or they can move back to Reddit… and I think many choose the Reddit option.
It doesn’t help that federation is a complicated topic to understand and the recommended new user approach to Lemmy is to join a tiny server where you are required to use federation and to hope that it is working (while also having no obvious indication if federation is working today or not). To use the email analogy, I get a “bounce back” email notice if my email being sent out cannot be delivered and I get that notice quickly. With broken federation, I have to do research and visiting external sites to determine if my message got through or if I am even receiving any new messages at all. People can get a little annoyed when things are mysteriously not working or when things “may be working or not, who knows?”.
Lemmy likes to emphasize that you should register for smaller instances and not with larger ones. This “spreads out the load”.
As usually, there’s a bit of information to add to that advice: join one of the top 20 instances, just not the biggest one.
I agree it can be confusing.
Can we sidestep the usual complaints about federation or instance-specific issues? Instead of worrying about the potential roadblocks, let’s look at the end goal and work our way back.
Onboarding new reddit users is not difficult. The system that I built for fediverser is running just fine on alien.top, and people can sign up with their Reddit login and already get auto-subscribed to all the relevant communities. If more instance admins decide to use it, I could even add it to https://fediverser.network where anyone coming from Reddit don’t even have to choose an instance, and we just redirect them to the ones that are available and with the most affinity.
The real challenges now are related to chicken-and-egg of content. People don’t want to leave Reddit because that’s where their communities are. Moderators don’t want to leave Reddit because that’s where people are. The mirror bots were meant to solve one side of this, I’m just missing a good, easy, censorship resistant way to make the bridges.
Can we sidestep the usual complaints about federation or instance-specific issues?
We could… but people have concerns about their communities being always operational and their accounts always working. They want to easily register here and have a smooth experience. They cannot easily register because they need to know a few things (like where to register) and if their experience will be significantly lousy if they make any mistakes. This is for both people providing content (users) and people managing communities (moderators) who also need to know that their jobs won’t be significantly harder when they come over here.
Great work on the https://fediverser.network/ site! A simple guided pathway towards a great Lemmy instance (and perhaps a Lemmy instance which hosts many communities that they want to interact with) would be a welcome addition. Perhaps there could be a similar guided pathway for mods trying to find a great place to set up their community would be helpful as well.
We could… but people have concerns about their communities being always operational and their accounts always working.
Part of the job of any project manager is setting the right expectations. We shouldn’t be promising a flawless execution and we should be upfront to mods and the userbase that the whole idea is to do this as an exercise to find out the issues and learn the best workarounds, so that we can be ready to do it in a larger scale.
The mirror bots were meant to solve one side of this, I’m just missing a good, easy, censorship resistant way to make the bridges.
The fact that they work is quite impressive. I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but the work you did is something.
Can I screenshot this and add to a “testimonials” area of my github? :)
Feel free, I might have a few other comments along those lines somewhere!
In my eyes, new users should just join some big reliable instance. Then, once they have some experience with Lemmy and actually know a bit about the instances, they can switch. Switching is pretty easy nowadays.
Except from SJW and LW who are still on 0.18.5
Picking specific subreddits is my preferred method as well. It takes time and effort, but it has a better impact.
The biggest selling point to most users might be having an official backup community.
- Reddit goes down? Check for updates here
- Reddit does something you don’t like? Move here
The problem I’ve faced is that even if the subreddit wants to build up a community here, users eventually stop posting if no one from their original community is seeing the content. I still post on Lemmy fairly often, but I don’t post anything (expect big announcements) to !ubc@lemmy.ca for example.
However, I think a mirroring tool has a good chance of solving that issue. We’ve seen some mirroring projects pop up with different implementations, but I still think that it could help a lot if implemented correctly. My vision for what that involves consent at every level, otherwise it will run into the same issues as the previous ones:
- During setup, the mods of BOTH the Lemmy community and the subreddit need to manually establish a connection. Both should have the ability to end the connection. I’m thinking a bot account on each side should do the trick.
- Users should manually flag their post when they want the bot to mirror it. The tool should check if the OP of the post included a flag (ex.
!mirrorMeBotor!mirrorBridge) either in the title, post body, or as a top comment. When triggered, the bot’s counterpart in the other community will make the post, then post a link to that post as a reply to the first one.
This feels like the best way to get cross-pollination going. Users will be able to use the platform they prefer, while constantly having access (and being reminded of) the other community. There will be next to no downside for posting in Lemmy over Reddit. It would also be an easy first step to get the ball rolling on future collaborations.
Now the biggest issue here (and with any collaboration tbh) is malicious use of the tool. Having the tool be opt in could be a start, otherwise maybe account age / karma filters?
The problem I’ve faced is that even if the subreddit wants to build up a community here, users eventually stop posting if no one from their original community is seeing the content.
They were not opt-in (and I’m firmly in the camp that believes that “opt-in” bridges are a bad idea), but that was the second most important pain point that I wanted to solve with the alien.top bots (behind it being a tool to help one-click migration).
The tool should check if the OP of the post included a flag (…) either in the title, post body, or as a top comment.
This feels like it can become a brittle solution and can get way too complicated fast. My plan for fediverser now is to let people create bridges by authenticating with their Lemmy and Reddit account, and then specify what type of bridge. E.g, users could choose if want their responses in Lemmy to become a response on Reddit, or just to send a PM to the OP indicating the Lemmy link.
In any case, I’d personally favor any approach which establishes that the net flow of content is out of Reddit, not in. If we keep mirroring the content from here to Lemmy, the people there will have even less incentive to leave, but if we use the intolerant minority strategy we might end up forcing the majority to migrate as well.
ive been attempting a scalable, solid instance for this reason. i would like to draw an entire sub out.
i lack the communication skills needed to convince anyone of anything though… and reddit seems openly hostile to ‘reddit alternatives’
and reddit seems openly hostile to ‘reddit alternatives’
Some mods are too. I talk about Lemmy in one of the subs I know, but I keep it low profile and make sure to still comment outside of talking about it to avoid being categorized as spammer
Would you mind sharing the details? What subreddit do you want to move?
honestly, Any. i used reddit 15+ years and finally abandoned ship last year. i want to help others.
If i could choose a sub it would be one of the meme-based, or otherwise comedically driven… i am advertising my instance as a nonsense-aggregator.
There are some top level issues are some smaller (but no less problematic) issues underneath.
They probably need to be spoken about.
The big two are:
Issue 1) Why should I leave, or partially leave reddit?
Issue 2) Why should I go to lemmy?
The issues I have and have heard about.
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Isn’t it full of tankies and trannies?
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Do I join lemmy.com or what? There are a load of websites which do I join? How do I join?
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Is there a app for this?
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Isn’t it dead over there?
And remember a lot more people read comments than reply to them, or even vote on them. Just because no one asked about something doesn’t mean 10 people didn’t read you comment and think. “I’m not going there because of XYZ”
Issue 1) Why should I leave, or partially leave reddit?
Reddit is undergoing a process of Enshittification, is constantly trying to trick you with new ways to display ads as posts, sells your data, and suffers from centralized corporate control.
Issue 2) Why should I go to lemmy?
Lemmy (and other fediverse options, like Piefed) is the only long-term solution to enshittification or good owners inevitably selling out to for-profit companies. If we stay with Reddit or any other closed-source privately owned social media platform, it will simply start the cycle anew, just like Reddit was the beginning of a new cycle after Digg became enshittified.
Granted, for the average user, both of those answers probably don’t really matter, but I’m not sure we should be targetting them initially anyway, they’re happy with being abused, and would be difficult to convince to switch.
- Isn’t it full of tankies and trannies?
The tankies are thankfully isolated to their little corners of the fediverse, since most instances defederated from them. As for the second part, uhm… If that’s a problem, I’m not sure if we’d want them here anyway.
Do I join lemmy.com or what? There are a load of websites which do I join? How do I join?
https://join-lemmy.org/ has revamped the onboarding process, and I think solves any confusion that may have existed.
Is there a app for this?
https://join-lemmy.org/apps gives a nice list of those at a glance, though they could’ve made the link to that page a little more prominent. Searching ‘lemmy’ on an appstore would also bring up some apps.
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Please dont’ call it the “Threadiverse” the biggest advantage of Lemmy/kbin/mbin is ActivityPub and the fediverse.
You can’t follow a Mastodon account from Lemmy.
Those two types of platforms are different, even if they both use ActivityPub, and calling them Threadiverse and Microblogverse (or whatever that name would be) seems fair
I follow Lemmy…this is a mastodon account
as far as I know, you can’t follow a Lemmy account from Lemmy.
Exactly.
Which is why it makes sense to distinguish platforms that are completely compatible (Lemmy and Kbin, or Mastodon with Misskey), compared to existing but lackluster compatibility (Lemmy and Mastodon)
I didn’t know that I had to power of changing the nature of things and their abilities just because of the name being used.
Worrying about the name is the same as saying “we shouldn’t make a distinction between mobile apps and web browsers because they both use HTTP”.
you certainly have the power to shape how people think about things by naming them, and you seem to understand that. the fact that there is an activitypub implementation called “threads” and that is owned by some of the worst social media villains is likely to confuse people about it and play right into the EEE plans that we know for-profit technology companies love.
so don’t do that.
Yeah, totally. My name is Raphael and I people keep confusing me with the Ninja turtle…
I don’t want to waste any more time with this ridiculous argument. This is unbelievably boring. If you understand what I mean, then the communication was successful. Instead of nitpicking over the terminology, I would appreciate if you responded instead with something pertinent to the discussion.
>If you understand what I mean, then the communication was successful
just because i understood doesn’t mean anyone else would. i’ve been using ostatus-enabled services over a decade. meta had a huge product launch with threads and promised to federate. it is confusing to refer to the fediverse as the threadiverse and serves to support an EEE agenda, whether you mean to or not.
just because i understood doesn’t mean anyone else would.
Then it’s on me to adjust my language to the different audience.
Look, you made a request and I already denied it. If you are more concerned with the form over the content of the discussion, please find someone else to pester. I really don’t respond well to this hallway monitor attitude. It’s this type of tone policing that sometimes makes a normal conversation impossible.
>Look, you made a request and I already denied it.
I’m not going to let your post and unchallenged, especially in this forum. the problem isn’t that your language is imprecise, it’s actively misleading. even if you won’t change your behavior, perhaps someone who might have thought it was acceptable will no longer feel that way.
@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.
How can a user on Lemmy follow an account on Mastodon ?
Mastodon accounts can follow Lemmy communities, but the opposite is not true.
That’s why people talk about the Threadiverse. Lemmy, Kbin, Piefed, Lotide use the same presentation and logic (threads).
Mastodon can technically interact with some of the Lemmy content, but it is limited as I stated above.
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
Hmm this is a good idea. Getting every day users to use Linux didn’t work out, but focusing on desktop gamers seems to be catching on.
That’s good to know. Is there any particular sub that you are seeing this movement? Would they be interested in joining alien.top?
