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!
I agree completely with what you say. But I also recognise that a lot of people get confused by all this “techno-babble”. To be honest, I am (admittedly an old) programmer, and I was hesitant and confused at first. I think the average user shouldn’t be concerned with instances. Why do I need to see <user>@<instance> and <community>@<instance>. Just drop the “@instance” (put it in a tooltip at least) and just make community-names unique across all instances (you could still have the same communityname in different instances, but give them a fediverse-alias which is unique)
I mean, it’s really not much different from email with different instances. My email address is [email protected], and yours is [email protected]. We’re on different email providers (instances) but we can still talk to each other. That’s not really “technobabble”, I mean, people understand email, right?
The problem with analogies is that they will break down at some point. Not to be pedantic or semantic, but social media is not the same thing as an email. It’s not about understanding email but about signing up to a website and finding things of interest without having to think about how it works. Sadly, most people just want things “to work” without having to go through a learning curve, no matter how small. But I could be wrong.
I’m kinda opposite of that opinion; at the moment it has the tendency to drop the @instance part when local; if I see anything on sh.itjust.works it’s just !main or something. I guess I’m a Python programmer, explicit is better than implicit.
As a programmer myself I get what you’re saying. But for the average user -I suspect- it is just extra, unimportant, information which could be confusing. (It adds no value nor importance)
I would say keeping consistent behavior so as not to confuse users is of value. Also stuff like “Am I on my local instance? It doesn’t actually say anywhere.” This is important information because different instances have different codes of conduct, which users should keep in mind.
Which does give me an opportunity to whinge about something: Instances usually post their rules in the sidebar of their homepage, which as far as I can tell cannot be viewed from within an account on another instance. I’m on sh.itjust.works; if I want to look at lemmy.world’s home page to read their code of conduct I have to awkwardly go to lemmy.world, it tells me I’m not signed in up in the corner, then I have to go back over to sh.itjust.works to participate in discussions.
Perhaps the instances’ home sidebar should be mirrored beneath the community sidebar for easy reference?
That is my point. Users should not be burdened by such things. Sure, a site has a code of conduct, but if I need to keep track of multiple codes of conducts on “one site” it becomes a burden. Again, just my thoughts, I hope it will work out. Rooting for lemmy and the downfall of Reddit at this point (for no other reason that I am an unreasonably moral bitch).
Yes, users should absolutely be burdened by such things, because that’s how this place HAS to work.
“Lemmy” is not “one place”, “one site” or “one platform.” It is software run by many independent servers that allows them to communicate with each other. Each of those servers is owned by different people and located in different countries each with different laws. Instances are operated for different purposes; many are general purpose, some are operated specifically for one area of discussion, ie “we’re only for music-related communities.” Some instances have mutually exclusive rules, sh.itjust.works forbids porn, lemmynsfw.com is specifically for porn. Hell, the Fediverse doesn’t stop at Lemmy; other, completely independent systems like Kbin also use ActivityPub and are compatible with Lemmy instances. Even if “Lemmy” somehow adopted a system-wide code of conduct, it might not apply elsewhere the protocol can take you.
You want a centralized platform? Stick with Reddit or Facebook or Twitter. They’re still there. Here’s the way I see it: We’ve been good little scientists. We’ve run and repeated the centralized platform experiment, and each time the experiment was run, it resulted in enshitification. None of those platforms are actually for facilitating communication between people, they’re for showing people ads. They attract those people by begrudgingly allowing them to communicate. Well inevitably the advertisers have their way and turn the place into pits of addictive rage bait using any method they can to keep you on their platform looking at their ads. AKA enshitification.
The fediverse is an attempt at addressing that inherent flaw; spread the actual ownership of the platform around so that no one entity can have that kind of effect on the overall flow of discourse. This means the platform is inherently pluralistic and fragmented. It means the Fediverse is conceptually more complicated. The experiment we are running now is to see if that price will pay for preventing enshitification. I look forward to examining the data of this experiment.
Subreddits had different “codes of conduct” as well. Every single subreddit has different community rules while the overall centralized site also has an over-arching code of conduct. I suppose there were users who just ignored this completely, I assume the same will be true anywhere else.
I don’t think this is anything novel or confusing - but I agree with above commenter who said the rules should be somewhere visible and easy to access for people from other instances.
If you did that it would get quite dicey quite quickly. How would two instances decide to federate together if they already had a whole ton of common communities (ie “programming” or “memes”), and part of the idea is that you can run an instance without needing to be beholden to the activities of other instances, while still being able to federate with them. Having that strong of a dependency on the other instances would likely make things quite unmanageable.
You are not wrong. But that is not user-centric. I think this fediverse has potential, but it needs to find a way to make it more human-centric rather than technical-centric. If it fails, it will probably be because it fails to be intuitive. (just my gut feeling)
That’s a good point. I do have hope that people will come to understand the distributed nature of it not long from now. Mastodon (while confusing at first) seems to have stabilized and most people seem happy with it. That said, if the education isn’t there, then it’ll never be user-centric, and if that doesn’t happen, you’re right that’ll be a big problem.