In the months since I deleted my Reddit accounts and joined Lemmy, the lack of user base growth has made it clear that we need some users to stay on Reddit as a means of shepherding more users over on an ongoing basis. Otherwise, Reddit simply got what it wanted: less users who make a fuss about how it manages its platform without losing users en-masse.
In doing so, however, does Reddit shadowban posts that mention or promote Lemmy? Googling mentions of Lemmy on Reddit mostly brings up posts from around the time of the blackout, suggesting that mentions of it since then have been suppressed. Before I return to Reddit to promote Lemmy, does anyone know for certain one way or the other?
I think the reality is that no one on Reddit gives a shit about Lemmy. I used to see if my comments were being deleted by a mod by opening the permalink in a private browser window. I don’t know if admin removal has a more complicated way of masking it or not.
I wouldn’t be so sure:
Not enough users left Reddit after the blackout to either make a difference there or establish communities on Lemmy that are big enough to encourage people on the fence to switch over. To turn Lemmy into a viable alternative, we need to convince more Redditors to switch over by mentioning Lemmy in the right threads, making sure to explain features of Lemmy in terms of Reddit analogs to avoid the usual complaints of Lemmy being difficult to understand. Most people won’t care, but the ones that do will be vital in bringing the userbase to the point where people will want to join Lemmy due to it having active communities rather than it just not being Reddit.
When I ended up at Reddit 16 years ago after Digg, I don’t recall it being a huge community immediately. I think it helped that there weren’t subreddits yet. So, probably seemed like more people. I think it took a couple of years for the transition to hit critical mass.
Yup, this is the answer. We know enshittification will continue apace because history has shown that these companies will never change their behaviour. They are fundamentally fragile systems.
The way to deal with this is not some big marketing push - that’s a centralised approach - but to make an antifragile system that will slowly gain users and not lose them en masse. It’s the tortoise vs the hare.
Lemmy is the tortoise.
I’m not even too worried about corporate entryism - although I do think we should block them - because they will only make fragile instances and they will be outlasted as long as we keep independent instances alive and healthy.
That’s how I see Threads at the moment, an opportunity for on-ramping to better platforms is better than nothing. The problem is hoping Meta doesn’t compromise on the transition function if a user wants to leave.
The one thing we can certainly count on META doing is screwing their users over if they think it might make them money.
Precisely. Excellent points!
It would be really slick if you could join multiple communities into a larger virtual one kinda like multi-reddits. It would be a nice way to aggregate similar communities from different instances and not segment the limited userbase too much. I tend to rely on my main feed here more for similar reasons
A couple of the apps do have this “multi community” feature, if you’re a mobile user. Summit definitely does, Raccoon (the one I’m replying from now) technically does but it’s pretty broken so I’m hoping that gets looked at soon. And tbh maybe more of them do now, it’s been a while since I checked!
If the back end provided support for multi-communities it would work cross-app in the same way… unfortunately it looks like this is not a priority for the time being.
Mbin has that
It’s already a viable alternative. I can tell because I’m only here and not there anymore and lack nothing
This is just the worst idea. First off, it would require me to have a reddit account, which I nuked. Second, it’d require me to go to reddit and there’s no more ingress points that won’t rape my eyes. And finally, I’m not using my time and energy proselytizing just to accelerate another tragedy of the commons.
I feel like we are very close to this inflection point where all the pieces are in place to make mass migration completely transparent. What is missing: