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.

  • thegiddystitcher@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    9 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 [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! 😄