We’re about to enter another Reddit mass migration phase starting tonight. We’ve already attracted the users most actively engaged with the protests and Reddit’s changes—users who are driven enough to put in the effort to grow the Fediverse.
Now we need to make it feel like home to casual users and lurkers. Not just attract them for a few visits, but keep it interesting enough that they stay here in the coming weeks/months.
Major kudos to all the developers working day and night to bring us familiar-feeling apps and interfaces on insanely short timelines. But what can the rest of us do to make Kbin and Lemmy feel like home to all the new Reddit refugees? Populate Lemmy and Kbin with as much quality content as you can find!
Over the next few weeks, fill your magazines/communities with as much good the content as you can. Post comments and subscribe to things. Click that upvote button on content or comments you like.
Not sure where to find good content? Ironically, check out your favorite subreddits for ideas. Make sure we have the best of the content you can find on Reddit. See a good article or link? Post it here! Don’t be shy about posting to interactive communities like Ask Lemmy- we’re after volume.
For OC Reddit posts, see if there’s a non-Reddit page to post here. I don’t know whether it’s acceptable to copy text posts, but if you do, make sure you at least give credit/copy a link to the original post.
Basically, do everything you can to engage over the next few weeks and avoid lurking. Show off the Fediverse and welcome the next group of Reddit refugees to their new home.
Edit: I completely forgot to call out all the people hosting and upgrading instances to help with the massive influx of users and keep the sites stable. Thank you, hosts!
There sure is! A few actually, but [email protected] seems to be the only one with real activity.
If you’re on a browser, you can search for communities with the search button in the top right. Make sure you set the Search dropdown to Communities and the Subscribed/Local/All option to All. The search can take a little time and it’s not predictive, so you may need to search a few times to see everything. For instance, I searched for both aita and asshole to see all the AITA communities.
https://browse.feddit.de/ provides a more user-friendly experience with real-time searching and filters for the different instances in case you don’t want to engage with one or it’s defederated from your instance. Plus it shows you how many posts and comments each community has so you don’t have to click on each one to see how active it is.
Welcome to Lemmy!
Also check out lemmyverse.net for a comprehensive collection of instances and communities. After you find one you like, copy the link into your home instance search, wait a second or two for the result to appear (or refresh after a sec) and then you can subscribe to new communities.
Oh that looks so much better than browse.feddit.de. More information and better design. Thanks for the suggestion!
sub.rehab too for some direct subreddit comparisons.
Check out https://lemmyverse.net/
If a community doesn’t immediately come up in your instances search bar that means no user there has subscribed there yet. You need to search the full url of the community the first time. Ma takex up to thirty secs to appear but then everyone else can find it easily.
Can you explain the different instances, as if I’m a moron? Or direct me to a resource that explains it? If I’m in reddthat.com do I still have access to the whole Lemmy universe? I can’t seem to follow the link you gave me and don’t understand why …
Oops, I’m still trying to figure out the formatting for links. Sorry!
The full URL should look something like yourinstancename/c/communityname@articleinstancename. So since you’re on reddthat.com, for you to access [email protected], you’ll need to go to reddthat.com/c/[email protected]. If you were visiting a community that’s on your own instance, you can drop the @instancename part at the end.
For what instances are, think of it like email. You can have Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, AOL, or any other email client and can send messages to users on any other client since they share the same protocol/language. It’s the same idea here. Every community is hosted on a particular instance, such as reddthat or lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works. Since all instances use the same protocol, a user from any instance can see and interact with content on any other instance (with an exception I’ll get into in a sec).
Back to the email analogy. If someone using Hotmail gets an email from someone using Gmail, the Hotmail user doesn’t actually access Gmail itself to read the message. Instead, Hotmail makes a copy of the message on its own servers for the Hotmail user to read. With the Fediverse, same idea - if you see content originally posted on another instance, you’re technically seeing a copy of that content hosted on your instance. And if you interact with it, like making a post or commenting or even upvoting, you’re doing that on your copy of the content, which is then synced back with the original copy. From there it’s pushed out to all the other copies on all the other instances that are synced to the content. This is what Federation refers to - separate instances hosting different content that all communicate with each other to make a single community out of all its different parts.
The exception to all this direct communication is defederation, which is when two instances don’t talk to each other directly (usually one cuts off the other). This means that users on those instances can’t see or interact with content on the other instance. Defederation is a pretty extreme measure and its use varies instance-to-instance based on the admins. Some instances are pretty quick to defederate (such as Beehaw) but most see defederation as a last resort.
I hope that made sense!
Great info. Thanks!
Go to your instances search bar and if this doesn’t come up then paste this full url and wait half a minish. Then after that initial search you can subscribe easily.
My userscript (Lemmy post) can also help you with this globally on all websites :) It rewrites all links everywhere to always point to your home instance.
At the bottom of each instance you can see what Instances block others by clicking on “Instance”, right next to modlog.
Here’s reddthat’s blocked list.