We’re about to enter another Reddit mass migration phase starting tonight. We’ve already attracted the users most actively engaged with the protests and Reddit’s changes—users who are driven enough to put in the effort to grow the Fediverse.
Now we need to make it feel like home to casual users and lurkers. Not just attract them for a few visits, but keep it interesting enough that they stay here in the coming weeks/months.
Major kudos to all the developers working day and night to bring us familiar-feeling apps and interfaces on insanely short timelines. But what can the rest of us do to make Kbin and Lemmy feel like home to all the new Reddit refugees? Populate Lemmy and Kbin with as much quality content as you can find!
Over the next few weeks, fill your magazines/communities with as much good the content as you can. Post comments and subscribe to things. Click that upvote button on content or comments you like.
Not sure where to find good content? Ironically, check out your favorite subreddits for ideas. Make sure we have the best of the content you can find on Reddit. See a good article or link? Post it here! Don’t be shy about posting to interactive communities like Ask Lemmy- we’re after volume.
For OC Reddit posts, see if there’s a non-Reddit page to post here. I don’t know whether it’s acceptable to copy text posts, but if you do, make sure you at least give credit/copy a link to the original post.
Basically, do everything you can to engage over the next few weeks and avoid lurking. Show off the Fediverse and welcome the next group of Reddit refugees to their new home.
Edit: I completely forgot to call out all the people hosting and upgrading instances to help with the massive influx of users and keep the sites stable. Thank you, hosts!
Oh ok? I feel like that makes this not a Reddit competitor then, there are far too many instances with the same community names run by different people posting different or the same exact content. I kind of get the federated bit but now if I want to find what equates to a gaming subreddit I have to search on an external website to find probably 10+ communities by the same name that I now need to monitor for a few days to see which has the content I'm looking for... that's a LOT of work to do to find a single community as opposed to using reddit where I look up gaming and then join r/gaming.
That'll die down. It's a new community so it's a bit like the wild west while everyone finds their place.
This sort of thing happens on Reddit too, with several subreddits for the same topic. Most of them find their own thing and they become different. The same will probably happen here.
Yeah, there's r/Gaming on Reddit, but there's also r/Games, r/VideoGaming and so on. It's really not that different here.
Being able to find communities on other instances does seem to be getting better, and it seems to work better on 3rd party apps like Liftoff, rather than the website or Jerboa.
I agree completely with what you say. But I also recognise that a lot of people get confused by all this "techno-babble". To be honest, I am (admittedly an old) programmer, and I was hesitant and confused at first. I think the average user shouldn't be concerned with instances. Why do I need to see @ and @. Just drop the "@instance" (put it in a tooltip at least) and just make community-names unique across all instances (you could still have the same communityname in different instances, but give them a fediverse-alias which is unique)
I mean, it's really not much different from email with different instances. My email address is [email protected], and yours is [email protected]. We're on different email providers (instances) but we can still talk to each other. That's not really "technobabble", I mean, people understand email, right?
The problem with analogies is that they will break down at some point. Not to be pedantic or semantic, but social media is not the same thing as an email. It's not about understanding email but about signing up to a website and finding things of interest without having to think about how it works. Sadly, most people just want things "to work" without having to go through a learning curve, no matter how small. But I could be wrong.
As a programmer myself I get what you're saying. But for the average user -I suspect- it is just extra, unimportant, information which could be confusing. (It adds no value nor importance)
That is my point. Users should not be burdened by such things. Sure, a site has a code of conduct, but if I need to keep track of multiple codes of conducts on "one site" it becomes a burden. Again, just my thoughts, I hope it will work out. Rooting for lemmy and the downfall of Reddit at this point (for no other reason that I am an unreasonably moral bitch).
Subreddits had different “codes of conduct” as well. Every single subreddit has different community rules while the overall centralized site also has an over-arching code of conduct. I suppose there were users who just ignored this completely, I assume the same will be true anywhere else.
I don’t think this is anything novel or confusing - but I agree with above commenter who said the rules should be somewhere visible and easy to access for people from other instances.
If you did that it would get quite dicey quite quickly. How would two instances decide to federate together if they already had a whole ton of common communities (ie "programming" or "memes"), and part of the idea is that you can run an instance without needing to be beholden to the activities of other instances, while still being able to federate with them. Having that strong of a dependency on the other instances would likely make things quite unmanageable.
You are not wrong. But that is not user-centric. I think this fediverse has potential, but it needs to find a way to make it more human-centric rather than technical-centric. If it fails, it will probably be because it fails to be intuitive. (just my gut feeling)
That's a good point. I do have hope that people will come to understand the distributed nature of it not long from now. Mastodon (while confusing at first) seems to have stabilized and most people seem happy with it. That said, if the education isn't there, then it'll never be user-centric, and if that doesn't happen, you're right that'll be a big problem.
I don’t know, lots of subreddits served similar content with slightly different names. Askreddit/ask, bicycling/cycling and countless others. I guess different cultures/values would exist in each much like on reddit, but one would emerge as the “big” one.