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!
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.