Fediverse

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 [email protected] and [email protected] 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! 😄

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.

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 [email protected] (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.

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.

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.

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.

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?".

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 [email protected] 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. !mirrorMeBot or !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?

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'

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.

1. Isn't it full of tankies and trannies?

2. Do I join lemmy.com or what? There are a load of websites which do I join? How do I join?

3. Is there a app for this?

4. 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"

Please dont' call it the "Threadiverse" the biggest advantage of Lemmy/kbin/mbin is ActivityPub and the fediverse.