When reddit goes dark on Monday, there will be a horde of people looking for an alternative. When the APIs go dark at the end of the month, another horde will come. When /u/spez says just about anything, it'll happen again. What can we do to prep here for that? How can we attract good moderators to moderate communities here?
Just listing things I noticed from the twitter/mastodon migration:
- Mastodon had a few thousand signups per hour during the peak times.
- Having a single instance (or even a small number) really simplifies the signup process. How can we scale lemmy.ml and other big instances now to prep for Monday?
- I'm seeing communities already pop up (/c/earthporn, /c/photography and my favorite /c/jeep). If we can keep content flowing through some of the big communities, it'll help people come back on Tuesday. (On a Sunday night at 7pm MDT, the backend on lemmy.ml is getting crushed and posting is haphazardly working for me...)
- A good intro doc would help folks get up to speed faster (this is how lemmy/fediverse works, he's a list of mobile apps you can use, here's how to sign up on patreon... etc).
Scaling lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, and lemmy.one (those are the ones mentioned in the pinned post for "joining") is probably the biggest priority. If owners of these instances need money to pay for server fees, expertise with server migrations, deployments, scaling, dev work, etc, they really need to communicate.
The proverbial "call to arms" would be appropriate.
We've got lots of super nerdy folks here that can donate time/money. Personally, I'm not sure how I can help right now. (Currently subbed on Patreon, but that's it).
i don't think we need bigger instances, i think we need more instances, and a better, streamlined process for finding instances
Lemmy's current approach to finding off-instance communities is a UX nightmare.
To the average, non-techy user pasting
!<community>@<instance_url>to getNo resultsdespite knowing that community exists is... Offputting. Lemmy should not be showingNo resultswhile waiting to federate content, and it should be health-checking a search term before returning anything. A single request to<instance_url>/c/<community>would reveal it exists, and prevent this terribleNo resultsresponse entirely.Yeah totally, the federated features and especially the search could be streamlined quite a bit. I think this should be a top priority currently (to avoid centralization of the instances).
This is the main problem the fediverse experiences across the board. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to require a basic level of comprehension to sign up though. Inconvenient, sure, but if this is just the nature of the thing, it's still better than being owned by venture capital.
Both us lemmy devs agree with you, we want a distributed network, not a single centralized service, that could potentially suffer all the same problems as reddit.
Plus its just more work for all us server admins.
I agree - decentralized is the future. Fwiw, I'm really enjoying lemmy and want it to succeed. I'm just hoping to help somehow. I'd love for centralized social networks to become decentralized so that the perverse incentives that exist currently can evaporate.
I'm nervous posting this because I don't want to come off as telling you "what to do". This is coming more from a desire to support the awesome work you're doing to help lemmy grow on the fediverse. If this is too "forward" - I'm happy to back down and continue posting everything I've got to /c/earthporn, /c/photography, and /c/jeep. ;)
It seems in the short term, we're just trying to capture and retain users so that communities can grow and become new homes for reddit refugees.
Some ideas:
For one thing, it might be nice if individual instances could assign tags or categories, and if pages like join-lemmy.org/instances could allow users to browse the list of instances with a given tag. Then prospective users could choose a tag that best represents their interests, and have an easy list of instances related to that tag.