Been moving from Reddit to Lemmy slowly so far and now I wanted to bring some of the communities I moderated there to here, as a huge car enthusiast I wanted to not only bring car related subs to communities here on lemmy.world, I also wanted to mod the “cars” community from the instance on lemmy.world already but I realized the moderator there has been inactive for several months now.
It looks like that community is a lost case and this is concerning, how many more communities are stuck like this? This should have been really affecting Lemmy badly thus far and it seems many power mods came in and claimed multiple community names when the blackout happened without actually committing to the platform.
I really hope the developers find a solution to this, so that those like me who actually wants to commit and moderate can do so.
If there’s a technological solution, maybe it’s to allow admins to make moderatorship automatically expire, leaving the community up for grabs, under certain circumstances. The ability to exempt communities and/or users from this might be helpful.
Otherwise you just gotta ask the admins. Lemmy.ml has a community specifically for requesting dormant communities, for instance, and unless things have changed that’s how it worked on Reddit.
I kind of wish there was a way to “forward” your community if you realize someone else is doing a better job in a different instance too. So essentially all your users and traffic would just redirect to the other instance from that point on.
I am subscribed to like 3 different printsf communities and only one is even halfway active at this point. Would be nice if there was a way to consolidate under one banner.
Slightly off-topic, but how are you finding encouraging Reddit users to make the switch to Lemmy?
I mod r/futurology, which is close to 20 million subscribers, but most of the growth for futurology.today has come from within the fediverse. Any tips for encouraging Redditors to migrate?
I think a good starting point would be advertising Lemmy where possible on your subreddit, such as pinning an equivalent futurology community from Lemmy linked to a reddit post and pinning that, also mention your lemmy community on other places like mentioning Lemmy and asking users to consider Lemmy instead on the welcome message when new users join/subscribe to r/futurology.
We can’t force people to join, but we can emphasize the negatives of Reddit and the ways Lemmy solves those. Things like:
- Lemmy does not collect personal data and share it with third parties like Reddit does
- Lemmy does not violate your privacy with tracking or ads like Reddit does
- Lemmy’s code and algorithms can be viewed and reviewed by anyone at any time as-is, unlike Reddit
- Lemmy is 100% self-funded and moderated by its own users across the world. Reddit and your data is governed by a single money-driven corporation with controversial leadership
People that value those things are the ones that will consider moving over. You might say that you’ve read over Reddit’s terms and conditions, and then present the Lemmy community as a private and safe alternative if anyone wishes to join?
Important to add: Don’t force them to switch. Give them the chance to set up here and they will eventually realize this place is better. Or maybe they won’t but in that case you gave them their agency and they chose they’d rather be with the nazi shithole website so no loss for us.
No solution for communities that have bad mod eithers. At least with reddit you… (used to be able to) escalate blatant abuse to the admins.
Zero accountability. There isn’t even an appeals process, so if you get falsely banned you have no choice but to leave the community.
