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A different strategy for promoting the Threadiverse (communick.news)

submitted 4 months ago by rglullis@communick.news to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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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.

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[-] thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee 46 points 4 months ago

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 !knitting@lemmy.world and !lemmy_stitch@sh.itjust.works 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! 😄

[-] Blaze@reddthat.com 11 points 4 months ago

Thank you for what you are doing, it's great!

I kind of agree that Lemmy is still too rough around the edges. Sublinks, piefed.social and Mbin seem to progress fast, hopefully one of those can emerge as a better alternative

[-] thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee 5 points 4 months ago

I keep seeing mentions of this piefed thing but don't actually know what it is, better do some research before a curious knitter asks me and my illusion of expertise is shattered!

But yeah, we'll see. I have no particular horse in the race of which underlying software is running things, but as soon as one of them is a valuable option for my crafty friends they'll certainly hear all about it.

[-] Blaze@reddthat.com 4 points 4 months ago

Here you go: https://piefed.social/

One of their cool features is topics, such as this one that should interest you: https://piefed.social/topic/arts-craft

[-] thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee 8 points 4 months ago

That's just my Lemmy subscription feed but with extra AI "art" lol. But thanks, always interesting to learn about the up-and-comers. I wonder if we'll end up in an endless forking situation like with Misskey 🍿

[-] Blaze@reddthat.com 11 points 4 months ago

endless forking situation like with Misskey

As ironic as it seems, I would be happy to see this as it would mean Lemmy has enough devs so that different forks can be worked on at the same time

[-] thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee 7 points 4 months ago

The more the merrier, indeed!

[-] bigMouthCommie@kolektiva.social 9 points 4 months ago

>kind of enjoy the jank because it feels like an adventure

you know me better than i knew myself. are you taking clients?

[-] thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee 10 points 4 months ago

We were born too late to explore the globe or pioneer new settlements, but dammit we can try out weird new online platforms and nobody can stop us!

[-] ElCanut@jlai.lu 3 points 4 months ago

Hey sorry I don't know the story with the 0.19, do you have a link I could read please?

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[-] Candelestine@lemmy.world 29 points 4 months ago

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.

[-] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 8 points 4 months ago

In a funny way the spam flood has helped lemmy if anything. The maintainers are finally addressing mod tools, and a few mod bots have matured enough to be able to run. I agree, short term it's not great, but the script kiddies over in Japan I think ended up helping lemmy more than hurting it

[-] rglullis@communick.news 6 points 4 months ago

Exactly. "What doesn't kills us makes us stronger".

[-] rglullis@communick.news 7 points 4 months ago

I agree on the importance of content, but I do not worry about "only one shot of making a good impression". People are willing to turn a blind eye for the things they want to work out - in Brazil orkut (remember that?) was so successful that the "server error" due to overload page a meme in itself. Twitter's "Fail Whale" as well.

This is why the idea is to focus on one single subreddit, and why we need the support from their moderators. If we successfully turn this into a mission for the community, then all of the missteps can be forgiven and used as lessons of what not to do in in the next one.

[-] dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 19 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 10 points 4 months ago

It failed in the sense that Reddit still not just got what it wanted, it was a test that showed that most people don't really care about the nature of social media and tech companies, as long as their precious content is still provided. It certainly emboldened to go ahead with their plans of IPO and on monetizing user data.

I'm not saying we should bash ourselves. Trying and failing is certainly better than subjugating to the status quo out of apathy. But Lemmy is stuck at 35k MAU, which Reddit is one of the "smaller" social networks and still counts 400 *million MAU. I wouldn't call a "massive victory" if we only managed to reach 0.01% of the userbase, and it's not even like the people here completely got rid of Reddit, a good number of them are still quite active there.

[-] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 8 points 4 months ago

If we think of "reddit caved" as the only condition then yes it failed. If we add in others like "content providers left" and "quality of content dropped", then from what I read that is true. So they stained their name pretty badly, and I'm happy enough with that. And hey, it brought us here

[-] dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

We gotta see this as the victory it was.

We made a real impact on a landscape dominated by companies with more cash on hand than entire countries with almost zero budget and the equivalent of maybeeee 100 semi-full time developers, imagine what we can do with more resources and more development time behind the fediverse?

The truth is corporations have zero ability to push social networks into the future where they desperately need to go without violating their basic profit model, everything they are promising right now is either hot air or simply trying to get out in front of regulatory bodies like the EU.

We have no such limitations on our ability to craft the future and thus any speed we grow and innovate at is infinitely faster than Silicon Valley can on a medium term scale.

[-] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 19 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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 !linuxhardware@lemmy.ml (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.

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[-] shrugal@lemm.ee 18 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.

[-] herrcaptain@lemmy.ca 13 points 4 months ago

This is an excellent point. My benchmark for something like this is, "What would cause my wife to migrate from Reddit to Lemmy?" The answer is a Digg-level fiasco where the majority of users leave.

Those of us who already swore off Reddit in favor of this platform are vastly the exception. Most people follow the herd when it comes to social media.

That said, as much as I'd love to see a larger userbase and more active niche communities here, I'm quite happy with our incremental growth. The fediverse feels a lot more like the community of the early internet, which is something I really missed.

[-] Blaze@reddthat.com 5 points 4 months ago

The one thing you’re missing is a REASON for people to migrate to Lemmy.

Actively developped, ad-free mobile clients.

I know everyone on Reddit uses the Revanced Sync or Boost, hopefully at some point they won't work due to technical changes and the awfulness of the Reddit app will lead people here

[-] rglullis@communick.news 3 points 4 months ago

For the moderators, the story to tell it's easy: they are in abusive relationship with Reddit's management, and they are being offered a way out.

For the non-affected users, we can also find a very good reason: money.

Reddit is going to IPO soon, right? Let's get the WallstreetBets people involved, and let's show how people could make money by shorting Reddit's stock.

[-] shrugal@lemm.ee 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Moderators are taken advantage of, but they also get a free platform to host their community, and they can always step down if they want to. Most apparently have no issue playing by Reddit's rules, and therefore have no immediate need to switch to another platform.

I don't think the typical Reddit user cares much about shorting Reddit stock to make some money, they just want to talk and be entertained.

Those are things YOU care about and would motivate you to move, not the Reddit users you are trying to convince.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 3 points 4 months ago

Most moderators apparently...

I don't think the typical Reddit user cares much about shorting.

It's silly to dismiss a whole thesis based based on your concept of "typical" or "average" anything when the whole idea is to find and reach outliers in a large population.

Sorry for the personal callout, but are you always this negative? It seems like every comment or thread you participate is only to see how much you can put people down. Can you please at least try to see how it could work instead of spreading misery everywhere?

[-] shrugal@lemm.ee 3 points 4 months ago

It’s silly to dismiss a whole thesis based based on your concept of “typical” or “average” anything when the whole idea is to find and reach outliers in a large population.

I thought the whole idea is to make entire communities migrate to Lemmy, and obviously those that don't yet have enough incentive to make the switch, no? You'll need to convince the majority of users in those communities then, and that means just catering to some outliers won't cut it.

Sorry for the personal callout, but are you always this negative?

I'm not negative, I just try to think about how it might play out based on my understanding of how things work. Should I tell you how great your idea is instead, even though I think it has some major shortcomings?

Can you please at least try to see how it could work instead of spreading misery everywhere?

I'm sorry, maybe you're not used to this kind of critizism. I'm not saying it can't work, I just bring up things that I think are problems, so you can take them into account and decide if you agree or not. As I said, I do think it's worth trying.

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[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 13 points 4 months ago

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.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 6 points 4 months ago

But the protocol is the least important thing, it's the applications that come out of it.

Granted, I think it would be an improvement if we didn't have to care or think about what server you are using and people could keep their same identity regardless of the application they are using.

Yeah, it would be nice if I could keep my "communick.com" handle everywhere, but my usage and conversations on Lemmy are different from when I am on Mastodon. The audiences are different. It's a good example of The medium is the message.

[-] nutomic@lemmy.ml 5 points 4 months ago

The problem is that "Threadiverse" is almost never used together with "Fediverse", so anyone unfamiliar with the terms will think that they are totally distinct. I can understand if you want to categorize different platforms within the Fediverse, but then we should also start referring to Mastodon and similar projects as the "Tootiverse".

[-] Blaze@reddthat.com 3 points 4 months ago

but then we should also start referring to Mastodon and similar projects as the “Tootiverse”.

I've seen Mastoverse used a few times to describe Mastodon, Misskey and it's forks, and that part of Kbin. I guess as more and more comparison will emerge between the Threadiverse and the microblogging part of the Fediverse, a new name will emerge, and ideally platform neutral

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[-] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.

[-] otter@lemmy.ca 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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 !ubc@lemmy.ca 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?

[-] rglullis@communick.news 3 points 4 months ago

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.

They were not opt-in (and I'm firmly in the camp that believes that "opt-in" bridges are a bad idea), but that was the second most important pain point that I wanted to solve with the alien.top bots (behind it being a tool to help one-click migration).

The tool should check if the OP of the post included a flag (...) either in the title, post body, or as a top comment.

This feels like it can become a brittle solution and can get way too complicated fast. My plan for fediverser now is to let people create bridges by authenticating with their Lemmy and Reddit account, and then specify what type of bridge. E.g, users could choose if want their responses in Lemmy to become a response on Reddit, or just to send a PM to the OP indicating the Lemmy link.

In any case, I'd personally favor any approach which establishes that the net flow of content is out of Reddit, not in. If we keep mirroring the content from here to Lemmy, the people there will have even less incentive to leave, but if we use the intolerant minority strategy we might end up forcing the majority to migrate as well.

[-] thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 4 months ago

A very good idea! https://startrek.website/ took this approach, it'd be intersting to check in with them to see what they learned.

[-] gt24@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago

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?".

[-] Blaze@reddthat.com 6 points 4 months ago

Lemmy likes to emphasize that you should register for smaller instances and not with larger ones. This “spreads out the load”.

As usually, there's a bit of information to add to that advice: join one of the top 20 instances, just not the biggest one.

I agree it can be confusing.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 5 points 4 months ago

Can we sidestep the usual complaints about federation or instance-specific issues? Instead of worrying about the potential roadblocks, let's look at the end goal and work our way back.

Onboarding new reddit users is not difficult. The system that I built for fediverser is running just fine on alien.top, and people can sign up with their Reddit login and already get auto-subscribed to all the relevant communities. If more instance admins decide to use it, I could even add it to https://fediverser.network where anyone coming from Reddit don't even have to choose an instance, and we just redirect them to the ones that are available and with the most affinity.

The real challenges now are related to chicken-and-egg of content. People don't want to leave Reddit because that's where their communities are. Moderators don't want to leave Reddit because that's where people are. The mirror bots were meant to solve one side of this, I'm just missing a good, easy, censorship resistant way to make the bridges.

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[-] MBM@lemmings.world 3 points 4 months ago

In my eyes, new users should just join some big reliable instance. Then, once they have some experience with Lemmy and actually know a bit about the instances, they can switch. Switching is pretty easy nowadays.

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[-] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 4 points 4 months ago

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'

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[-] Wanderer@lemm.ee 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.

Isn't it full of tankies and trannies?
Do I join lemmy.com or what? There are a load of websites which do I join? How do I join?
Is there a app for this?
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"

[-] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Issue 1) Why should I leave, or partially leave reddit?

Reddit is undergoing a process of Enshittification, is constantly trying to trick you with new ways to display ads as posts, sells your data, and suffers from centralized corporate control.

Issue 2) Why should I go to lemmy?

Lemmy (and other fediverse options, like Piefed) is the only long-term solution to enshittification or good owners inevitably selling out to for-profit companies. If we stay with Reddit or any other closed-source privately owned social media platform, it will simply start the cycle anew, just like Reddit was the beginning of a new cycle after Digg became enshittified.

Granted, for the average user, both of those answers probably don't really matter, but I'm not sure we should be targetting them initially anyway, they're happy with being abused, and would be difficult to convince to switch.

Isn’t it full of tankies and trannies?

The tankies are thankfully isolated to their little corners of the fediverse, since most instances defederated from them. As for the second part, uhm... If that's a problem, I'm not sure if we'd want them here anyway.

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

https://join-lemmy.org/ has revamped the onboarding process, and I think solves any confusion that may have existed.

Is there a app for this?

https://join-lemmy.org/apps gives a nice list of those at a glance, though they could've made the link to that page a little more prominent. Searching 'lemmy' on an appstore would also bring up some apps.