When reddit goes dark on Monday, there will be a horde of people looking for an alternative. When the APIs go dark at the end of the month, another horde will come. When /u/spez says just about anything, it’ll happen again. What can we do to prep here for that? How can we attract good moderators to moderate communities here?

Just listing things I noticed from the twitter/mastodon migration:

  • Mastodon had a few thousand signups per hour during the peak times.
  • Having a single instance (or even a small number) really simplifies the signup process. How can we scale lemmy.ml and other big instances now to prep for Monday?
  • I’m seeing communities already pop up (/c/earthporn, /c/photography and my favorite /c/jeep). If we can keep content flowing through some of the big communities, it’ll help people come back on Tuesday. (On a Sunday night at 7pm MDT, the backend on lemmy.ml is getting crushed and posting is haphazardly working for me…)
  • A good intro doc would help folks get up to speed faster (this is how lemmy/fediverse works, he’s a list of mobile apps you can use, here’s how to sign up on patreon… etc).

Scaling lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, and lemmy.one (those are the ones mentioned in the pinned post for “joining”) is probably the biggest priority. If owners of these instances need money to pay for server fees, expertise with server migrations, deployments, scaling, dev work, etc, they really need to communicate.

The proverbial “call to arms” would be appropriate.

We’ve got lots of super nerdy folks here that can donate time/money. Personally, I’m not sure how I can help right now. (Currently subbed on Patreon, but that’s it).

  • @[email protected]English
    14•2 years ago

    Federation is a strength… but also a weakness. Lemmy is amazing but seems to have a potential - almost a default path - that’ll lead to proliferation of instances and fragmentation of communities, exactly as you’re flagging. This will hardly be in the best interest of broad adoption.

    Whether merging of communities across multiple instances is possible on the back-end or not (I have no clue myself), it’ll likely boil down to how the front-end apps do it. A smart, usable UI could “cross the streams” to a degree. Though, I have no idea what that would mean for moderation and even posting.

    On one hand, Lemmy basically is not ready for the influx. On the other, is anyone ever really ready when shit goes down? Right now is the purest opportunity this platform is going to get.

    It’s great to see this issue being raised now. The future of the platform will be determined by how quickly we can move to address some of these things. While there’s almost no time to prepare, there’s no earlier moment than now!