Let me start by thanking everyone that has joined https://fediverser.network and the ones who are already helping to categorize and create a map between subreddits and the recommended Lemmy alternatives. Y’all are amazing and I hope we can keep it up.
To keep in mind that the main goal of this whole project is to help people on reddit to migrate quickly and effortlessly to Lemmy, I was thinking on what could be done once we have the majority of the niche subreddits mapped out. I thought about the idea of creating “Community Ambassadors”, which would be basically people interested in “turning” other redditors from their specific communities to Lemmy.
Basically that would require you to signup to Fediverser to indicate what community you are focusing on and how many people you are willing to reach out per day. The system could then collect the top posts of that subreddit every day and let you trigger a (custom, personalized) DM to the people telling them about the alternative Lemmy community that exists with a link to alien.top’s portal to make one-click migration.
“What worries me is that since September, we are getting nothing but a constant flow of users trickling out of here and back into reddit. The long tail of niche communities is really long and the network effects are just too strong to ignore. If Twitter manages to survive because people think they can not leave, imagine with Reddit that does not get as fraction of the hate that Elon does.”
Sure, if things continue on as they have been indefinitely then this is a very worrying trend. Fortunately, one of the few things we can count on as humans existing on earth in 2023 is that things absolutely will not continue on as they have been indefinitely, it is impossible for them to do so. It is the same with corporate social media, it is utterly unsustainable whether we are talking on the level of the mental health impact from using corporate social media designed to be the digital equivalent of cigarettes or on the level of entire groups of people being shut out of monolithic social networks or experiencing life threatening amounts of harassment on them.
Don’t worry, the fediverse will grow longterm, honestly given the million different ways corporate social media hurts people it is frankly impossible for it not too. If now isn’t the right moment, fine, I am here and I enjoy the interactions I have with people. I don’t need it to be bigger right now for me to find it worthwhile to spend time on.
I remember when Facebook was screwing up so much that people raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the development of Diaspora.
I remember people complaining about Twitter since 2017. I got my first account on Mastodon around 2018. For all of Twitter removedups, people still like to complain about Twitter on Twitter, and its usage still persist.
I remember articles from journalists complaining about Big Tech overreach into public discourse since at least Obama 2012… yet can you name me one major newspaper running their own Mastodon or Peertube instance?
removed, man. Communick has been my on-again off-again project since end of 2019. In these 4 years, can you guess how many paying customers I had in total? Any other rational person would have looked at how much money it was sunk into this and would have cut the losses. I’m running this whole thing out of stubbornness and spite.
I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of people being too complacent with the status quo. I’m tired of slacktivists who love to yell what everyone else should be doing but can’t be inconvenienced to take 10 minutes to figure out how to use an app that is free from Big Tech.
I’m tired of seeing this cycle of people dropping one already-terrible platform in favor of something even worse. “Instagram is so bad, let’s go to Tik-Tok”.
I’m just losing faith.
I understand, it is heartbreaking isn’t it.
There is a functional open source reddit-like software now though. That is a material difference from where we were before.
Even if we are still a long ways off from large amounts of humans using it, we HAVE it now. We are using it right now. I think that is pretty cool, especially since in my opinion the reddit format of a web forum is a really powerful way for niche communities to have interesting conversations that others can easily search through and read.
sigh but yeah, I get it, this is a lonnnggg voyage lol