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.
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.
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
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.