When reddit goes dark on Monday, there will be a horde of people looking for an alternative. When the APIs go dark at the end of the month, another horde will come. When /u/spez says just about anything, it'll happen again. What can we do to prep here for that? How can we attract good moderators to moderate communities here?
Just listing things I noticed from the twitter/mastodon migration:
- Mastodon had a few thousand signups per hour during the peak times.
- Having a single instance (or even a small number) really simplifies the signup process. How can we scale lemmy.ml and other big instances now to prep for Monday?
- I'm seeing communities already pop up (/c/earthporn, /c/photography and my favorite /c/jeep). If we can keep content flowing through some of the big communities, it'll help people come back on Tuesday. (On a Sunday night at 7pm MDT, the backend on lemmy.ml is getting crushed and posting is haphazardly working for me...)
- A good intro doc would help folks get up to speed faster (this is how lemmy/fediverse works, he's a list of mobile apps you can use, here's how to sign up on patreon... etc).
Scaling lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, and lemmy.one (those are the ones mentioned in the pinned post for "joining") is probably the biggest priority. If owners of these instances need money to pay for server fees, expertise with server migrations, deployments, scaling, dev work, etc, they really need to communicate.
The proverbial "call to arms" would be appropriate.
We've got lots of super nerdy folks here that can donate time/money. Personally, I'm not sure how I can help right now. (Currently subbed on Patreon, but that's it).
I actually don't think there will be a big change.
Could be wrong but I think it will continue to be a drip of users coming in, not a big explosion on one day.
The context I'm using to predict the "big change" is the way the twitter/mastodon migration happened. Musk would do something, and literally within the same hour, thousands of new accounts would be created on mastodon and all those new users were flexing the various features in the platform to find accounts to follow and post content. With that history, I feel like "a drip" of users is unlikely - it'll be more like waves from multiple tsunamis.
If things play out the way I'm expecting they will, we really will need instance owners to stand up, ask for the help they need and coordinate those efforts. Otherwise, users like me will just post meandering comments like this one, wondering what we can do to help.