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.

  • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
    3·
    9 months ago

    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.

    • shrugal@lemm.eeEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      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!