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.
I feel like having comments in public threads would provide the most visibility/advertising for lemmy on reddit while simultaneously providing more content to interact with on the lemmy side, which is the most critical aspect needed over here, IMHO.
Setting up a bridge to DM the OP to inform them that a lemmy discussion on his post exists and imploring them to join doesn’t really offer a compelling reason to join, because that just shows them that even if they keep posting on reddit exclusively, they’ll get that benefit of Lemmy discussions coming in as DMs anyway, so why switch? And anyone participating in the Reddit thread normally would not even know that a lemmy discussion is happening.
If every comment in the lemmy thread bridged to the reddit thread, along with an automated message at the bottom that said something like ‘Posted from Lemmy’ with a hyperlink to the discussion on lemmy, I think that would intrigue the lurkers and commenters as well as the OP.
I think the goal for two-way communication is to show potential converts that they can choose to come to lemmy without having to log into reddit to keep up with their favorite communities, so the value-add is that they’re not missing out on anything, and they can join lemmy if they prefer it.
Realistically (for the average redditor anyway), lemmy doesn’t offer any compelling reason to use it over reddit unless you find the concept ideologically appealing already, or prefer the ‘village’ aspect that these smaller, more focused communities bring (those are the reasons I joined, personally). So I think it makes more sense to just try to bridge them to maximize activity here, which would (I assume anyway), encourage growth.
But that’s just my 2 cents. :)
My thesis is that content is king. There is a good number of people who are on Reddit not because it’s their favorite platform, but because they can’t find the content elsewhere.
If we mirror the content on Lemmy, then Lemmy will have the same content as Reddit, then the “lack of content elsewhere” stops being a problem, and then these people will be “free agents”.
If we have content here, the “problems” of Lemmy are not going to be seen in such a bad light. Conversely, if Reddit does not have exclusivity of the content, people are not going to feel the need to put up with all their crap.
Having a “two-way” bridge is not necessarily bad, but the more we have people saying "look, someone responded on , to respond, signup via " it will start creating a situation where people will be realize that they can choose between:
I am treating those in the “I will be annoyed by a bot asking me to migrate” as “people who are loyal to Reddit and not willing to move away”, so the sooner they block the bridge, the better for everyone. But again, my thesis is that these people are not so numerous as the ones that will just move to the platform that provides them the most content.