The NFL season is about to start and it would be nice to have as many people as possible participating on the communities from https://nfl.community/. Being a topic-specific instance with closed registrations, I'm aware that it is harder to be discovered, so I'm writing here with the intent of both promoting a bit and to find enthusiasts joining in.
If you'd like to help the instance and the team communities grow, there are two ways to help:
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Join https://fediverser.network/, find the Lemmy community you want to help and apply to become a Community Ambassador. Community Ambassadors can add different sources of content and also send invites to "good" reddit users to migrate.
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Become a moderator of your team community. The communities are still all low in traffic, so I guess the hardest part for the moderators will be in finding and posting the type of content that you'd like to see in the community, in order to set out its tone.
As always, if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask!
I'm confused.
Seems counterproductive. I thought we want people to embrace the Fediverse because it's Fediverse and not to create a clone of enshitified platforms. Funneling people to a few instances just amplifies the issue of big instances being the only place to grow any new community.
So it's better to promote the same popular communities and create a doom-loop of no new community ever-growing in activity because it never gets recommended?
We seem to have a different philosophy of what Fediverse is. Embracing diversity and federation are the fundamental principles behind Fediverse to me, not just trying to increase statistical numbers.
You are right. The wording needs to change, it should read as something like "comprehensive map of alternatives to Reddit", which is only in the subheader.
Baby steps. go take a look at /r/RedditAlternatives right now and see how many people are telling how difficult it is to migrate. We are not getting them out of enshittified platforms if they are thrown into a whole new paradigm. We need to ease them into it.
Yes. The paradox of choice is real. You and I might prefer to have absolute control, but the large majority of people are simply looking for a straightforward solution to their immediate needs. Just last week I was arguing with someone on [email protected] because it was the 5th community in a month created to talk about TV shows and movies.
If the recommended alternative is bad somehow, then sure let's move on. But if it is good enough, then please just let it be flexible and accept it.
The code is open source, and you are welcome to run your own instance of Fediverser, and the recommendation database can be cloned or forked however you see fit.
How is it comprehensive if it only lists singular alternatives? Seems contradictory.
Proposed service doesn't solve the issue, just delays it. Explained in https://lemmy.zip/comment/12893935
Then they are not interested in the Fediverse, but like I mentioned they are looking for a clone of whatever enshitified platform they left. You will never keep these type of users, as they will just go back to where they came from and complain how shitty that different place is. The goal should be to attract lurkers and convert them into posters.
To elevate Reddit user confusion about migration, we should have multiple Fediverser sites? If your primary goal is really to migrate Reddit users, then that is a horrible way to go about it. That would mean multiple Ambassadors, different recommendations and lack of any consistency between added communities, subreddits, recommendations and probably even instances.
The criteria also seem to not be applied universally. https://fediverser.network/subreddits/playstation lists a community with 0 interactions over several bigger and more active ones, same with https://fediverser.network/subreddits/xbox.
[email protected] was rejected as a first alternative to subreddit after I expressed my hesitation in a private message to migrate the community to
gearhead.townat this point in time.It's comprehensive for the point of view of subreddits, not of the Lemmy communities. The idea is to have one recommendation for each subreddit, not of all communities that can theoretically be related to a given subreddit.
That was also my argument when Reddit content was automatically mirrored on alien.top. That's also one of the reasons that I'm giving preference to topic-based instances. If someone sets up a Fediverser instance to mirror Reddit content and sends them to a topic-based instance, there will be less complaints than if the they are pointing out to a community on an instance that happens to host one relevant community.
Multiple fediverser sites is not a problem. Actually, there are already other deployments and I'm actively looking for other admins willing to deploy it on their servers.
I get that. And that's why I say it's not trying to help people understand Fediverse or ease them into it, but just to find a clone of the enshitified platform.
There is 0 value in that. What's the point of mirroring Reddit and then asking Reddit users to join here, instead of staying where they are, if the content is the same?
How does this help with easing users into Fediverse? You object to the idea of listing multiple alternatives because it's confusing, but you are fine with multiple sites for the same recommendations. Seems contradictory.
Also, can you give me a reason for rejecting [email protected]? And explaining why communities with 0 activity (e.g. [email protected] and [email protected]) are chosen over active ones?
Getting people out of Reddit and into the Fediverse is the goal. If that happens though different Fediverser instances, it's fine.
Because Reddit's content is not the problem, the rent seeking is. Their shitty client is. Their closing of the API is.
The people that are still on Reddit are not there out of loyalty, they are just there because that is where they find the content.
Because it is a community that is not on a topic specific instance with 3 posts, all by yourself.
That is my mistake. I was setting these communities for Reddit mirroring. What alternatives do you think should be in its place?
I feel like you are purposely avoiding the question. You previously said:
So how does multiple instances help with that? From my point of view, it makes it much more difficult and more confusing.
That is a false fallacy. We know that is not true from failed blackout. There were multiple platforms that people could have gone to, but didn't. Even outside Fediverse, where complexity of usability is not an issue. A very small minority of people left due to 3rd party clients being killed.
[email protected] is identical to [email protected]. I'm the only poster, but it was approved.
I'm just trying to understand what are the criteria. Does criteria from https://communick.news/comment/2934810 also apply to first recommendation or all recommendations? Because there are plenty of recommended communities with solo posters.
Is it better to have no recommendation until some threshold is reached?
All that matches the criteria, whatever they are from the above, but clearly we are in disagreement here.
They don't help, but they don't make it worse.
We can have people on fediverser.network trying to convince redditors to migrate. They will check the website, go through the instance selector, find an instance and register. Hopefully, they will be auto subscribed to the communities that are recommended and be satisfied with what they have.
Let's say we have another fediverser instance deployed by some admin from, e.g, Slovenia. This admin goes and promote their fediverser instance as the best one from Slovenians that want to migrate. There will be no "find my instance selector", because the fediverser instance is already has connected to a specific Lemmy server. The recommended communities has some overlap with fediverser.network, but for some communities they will prefer to recommend the completely local one.
Let's say one of the admins from lemmygrad/hexbear/tankie.social also deploys their own fediverser instance. They will be reaching out to a different subset of redditors, and those redditors will be expecting a different subset of communities.
Three different instances. Three different audiences, all of them with the common goal of getting people to migrate from Reddit to the Fediverse. It doesn't matter from the individual redditor point of view which instance they used to migrate, as long as the recommendations are sound. But if we try to get every redditor to through the same one instance, we will end up satisfying no one.
So you agree that the goal is not to ease people into Fediverse, but to create a clone like experience. Glad we finally got to that.
That's where we disagree. You think a single recommendation is sound and "less confusing" instead of helping people understand what Fediverse is and how it works.
I don't think it's productive, but good luck with the effort.
No, not at all.
You believe that Lemmy is better Reddit because of the things that it can do. I believe that Lemmy can be better than Reddit because of the things that it can not. Do you understand the difference?
Absolutely disagree!
The blackout failed precisely because there were no alternatives that could provide the depth and breath of content to the hundreds of millions of users that Reddit still has.
The majority of people who tried Lemmy during the protests went back to Reddit, and the major reason is simply lack of content in the long tail of diverse interests.
You just said content wasn't the problem:
It makes no sense that the blackout failed because of lack of content, since the content generation would have stopped on Reddit during the blackout. The backlash moderators got from their users for locking subreddits during the blackout was very telling. The reality is, people just don't care enough to switch if it doesn't affect them. And we know that % of people that used 3rd party clients was less than 5%, based on client download numbers it sat at around (6.9%, which counted users that just downloaded it once and never used).
Content can be a motivating factor in bringing in established posters, but even then it's more about the sunk cost fallacy than content. That's why converting lurkers into posters people is the way to grow new platforms. I'm the living proof of that, as I had 0 posts on Reddit.
And there were plenty of alternatives from established ones like Hacker News (founded in 2007) to new ones like Lemmy, Hive, Raddle, Saidit, who were all released before the Reddit changes were even announced.
I don't know if we are talking about the same thing when I say "content was not the problem".
What I mean is that people's objections to Reddit is not in the type of content that they could find there. Overall, people like the conversations they have there and they like the range of communities that were there. And none of the alternatives you mentioned stand on the same footing as Reddit, so there is no pointing in comparing them.
latteart does not have an topic-specific instance that I would consider a better home. rivian does.
It could be. My concern though is that this will lead to just a bunch of communities created around the top 3 largest instances. I strongly believe that one way to avoid network effects acting in favor of any particular instance is by establishing a more clean separation between "instances for people" and "instances for groups".
Yet, now, it has none.
There is no constancy in how things are applied.
Has 3 recommendations and allows recommending more.
Has 1 and doesn't allow recommending more.
Both are generic topics, but are also broad enough to potentially have topic-based instance. But are treated differently.
I'm starting to come to the conclusion that having a gatekeeper for recommendations is not the right approach. It will always lead to uneven application. Allowing all matching ones eliminates that issue as well as your "top 3 largest instance" concern.
But it's clear that we are in fundamental disagreement here. Time will tell if your effort was successful. Good luck.
If I may, lemmy.zip isn't in the top 3 instances. According to https://lemmy.ca/post/26878531, they barely have 3 communities in the 100 most active communities.
And this is why I didn't hesitate to approve some of the recommendations there. Still, "topic-specific instances over generic ones" remains a primary guideline.