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.

  • ProdigalFrogEnglish
    1•9 months ago

    I think that depends on the type of content a Subreddit consists of. If it’s purely a link aggregator to interesting things? Then I think your proposal would be effective. But for advice or help communities? I really don’t see that method panning out for two reasons:

    1. I anticipate the follow-through rate of OP’s creating a lemmy account just to respond to lemmings that respond to their thread will be very low, 5 to 10% at best. This will result in the lemmy folk having less incentive to engage with those threads if it’s extremely unlikely the OP will be able to effectively engage with them back. So there is content, but realistically the only conversations that will happen on lemmy will be between the already existing lemmings.
    2. The OP on reddit will ultimately be inclined to stay on reddit, because if they post on reddit, they get the best of both worlds, and would be disinclined to respond on lemmy unless the lemmy responder has critical information that OP really, really needs. If they did eventually switch to lemmy, they would experience the downgraded experience that all of the other lemmings are having with low-response rate with reddit-crossposts, and would likely decide to just go back to reddit.

    I very strongly feel that a true 2-way bridge is the best solution, at least for LinuxHardware-like communities, as it means switching to Lemmy has no real downside, since you retain all the benefits of being on reddit.

    Personally, I think Lemmy has a chance of beating Reddit in the long-term as the Reddit experience continues to get worse and worse, prompting people to try lemmy. And the best way to get people to know lemmy exists and is active, is if they constantly see lemmy-posts in the comments of their communities.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•9 months ago

      5 to 10% at best.

      5 to 10% of people creating new accounts would be amazing. The mirror accounts from fediverser collected around 1.5M accounts in about 2 months. 5% of that is 75 thousand, which means that we could be bringing 37.5k new users to Lemmy per month.

      folk having less incentive to engage with those threads if it’s extremely unlikely

      This will change with (a) the cumulative effect of new users migrating and (b) if we successfully explain to people that the idea is part of the orchestrated effort to get people out of Reddit.

      I very strongly feel that a true 2-way bridge is the best solution,

      There is also a practical issue to avoid sending comments to every reply. I will only have a message being sent to the comment if I can send it from the Reddit user (meaning, the Lemmy user that wants to use the two-way bridge needs to have an account on Reddit as well, ideally use their own API key to do it). I rather not use the fediverser API key to do that, because it can be flagged as spam and it will be likely to trigger a game of cat-and-mouse between Reddit admins and those running fediverser instances.

      So this is why I’d like to make it configurable. There will be people like you, who’d be okay with mirroring your comments. There will be people like me, who do not want to contribute to Reddit further and just to use the response system as a tool to get more content on Lemmy and eventually start converting some of the users.