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.
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.
Funny you mention the bots.
Not only I don't see any "harm" done there (I mean, really, was there any bad serious consequence of a system that replicated a few million comments?), to me it's a good example of this "progressive" generation acting like extreme reactionaries. Instead of adapting to a new scenario (hey, browsing by all is not really going to work if we have that many people posting content, maybe I should learn to curate the communities) and trying to learn with the new information and see where it would go, most people were just decided to take it as a personal attack on them (it wasn't) and their preferences.
Likewise, I refuse to see "trying to hard to get people to switch" as a bad thing. I honestly see it as a moral imperative: if corporate-controlled social media is bad for us, and if any social network depends on a sizable number of participants, then it stands to reason that we are only going to have a "healthy" internet when the mainstream is here. This is not just a fight over what site people use to share stupid memes, this is about not letting our collective imagination and culture be controlled by some oligarchs.
I still think it's a bit arrogant of you to assume you have the right to tell people how they are supposed to use Lemmy. Imo the bots started being harmful/annoying, but you stopped it at that point, idk how it would have evolved if you didn't. And ofc being blocked by LW didn't really make things better.
I actually think you're completely right, but people act according to their own opinions and not necesarrily moral standards or logical reasoning. It won't make a difference whether you're morally correct or not if they just don't agree and you keep pushing.
I don't see it as "telling people how to use it". What I wonder is how would people react differently if those were not really bots but just the people from Reddit actually moving over here. Would they keep complaining about people "flooding" or would they just accept that curating and filtering is indeed part of the toolbelt and should be used for this.
It's more or less the same people that complain about the bridges "because of privacy", but would be better off if they understood that using a "public social network" and keep expecting "privacy" is just the wrong tool for the job. If someone is using a system in a way that is not aligned with its intended design, there is no point in complaining about others breaking your expectations.
Anyway, I digress. I appreciate the improved tone in the conversation. I just hope that we can make it more productive as well.
I think they would welcome Reddit users with open arms. As I said back then, the problem was not the content of the posts, but the fact that bots were posting them. The fact is that we perceive communication differently depending on the sender and the context, even if it's the same message content, basically 1st semester communication science in a nutshell. You just can't reduce communication to a simple exchange of ascii characters and make assumptions based purely on that.
Yeah I really quite enjoyed this discussion! I know I can sound a bit mean sometimes, but I truly hope your plans to promote the Fediverse work out!