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.
Did the protests enact meaningful material change? No, and by that metric they failed. However I don’t think they failed at changing the status quo in terms of what people think is possible and what they will try as an alternative to corporate social media.
I am not trying to take away from your point but I won’t let us bash ourselves for failing here when I consider it a massive victory that is going to lead to many more victories.
It failed in the sense that Reddit still not just got what it wanted, it was a test that showed that most people don’t really care about the nature of social media and tech companies, as long as their precious content is still provided. It certainly emboldened to go ahead with their plans of IPO and on monetizing user data.
I’m not saying we should bash ourselves. Trying and failing is certainly better than subjugating to the status quo out of apathy. But Lemmy is stuck at 35k MAU, which Reddit is one of the “smaller” social networks and still counts 400 *million MAU. I wouldn’t call a “massive victory” if we only managed to reach 0.01% of the userbase, and it’s not even like the people here completely got rid of Reddit, a good number of them are still quite active there.
If we think of “reddit caved” as the only condition then yes it failed. If we add in others like “content providers left” and “quality of content dropped”, then from what I read that is true. So they stained their name pretty badly, and I’m happy enough with that. And hey, it brought us here
We gotta see this as the victory it was.
We made a real impact on a landscape dominated by companies with more cash on hand than entire countries with almost zero budget and the equivalent of maybeeee 100 semi-full time developers, imagine what we can do with more resources and more development time behind the fediverse?
The truth is corporations have zero ability to push social networks into the future where they desperately need to go without violating their basic profit model, everything they are promising right now is either hot air or simply trying to get out in front of regulatory bodies like the EU.
We have no such limitations on our ability to craft the future and thus any speed we grow and innovate at is infinitely faster than Silicon Valley can on a medium term scale.