Idea for Fediverser: Community Ambassadors to reach out to the best reddit posters?

Let me start by thanking everyone that has joined 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.

z00s,

I am so sick of the constant and insistent “How can we male this place just like reddot!?!?!” posts. Have you considered that people are here because they chose to leave R?

Just no.

If you want R, go back to R.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/1db3d650-5066-4fc2-a8a7-9427f934d3d6.jpeg

rglullis,

The idea is “how can we make the individual communities more like the interesting and vibrant communities that exist there”. There is no one single “reddit” to begin with. The main thing that made Reddit so appealing in the first place is that the people could make of it whatever they wanted, by choosing what subreddits to subscribe and participate.

Reddit’s problem is in its centralized control over this long tail of communities. Just that. If the subreddits could be left alone to their own management, no one would be talking about “leaving reddit” but would just talk about smaller issues on the subreddits.

z00s,

That’s all just your own personal preference and conjecture. Stop trying to force that on others.

rglullis,

just your own personal preference

Go check the amount of people on /r/redditalternatives that are saying the exact same thing.

Stop trying to force that on others.

Stop being an elitist jerk who thinks are better than the plebs. What makes you think you are so special that only you deserve to have a social media experience that is not controlled by Big Tech?

z00s,

Angry and stupid, a great combination

dumpsterlid,

Yes but we need to think really deeply about HOW we encourage people to join the fediverse. **How ** you invite people into a community determines what kinds of people come through the door and more importantly what version of each particular person actually comes through that door. We can be many people in many different contexts, which version of us is invited into a community makes every difference in the world.

You probably aren’t going to be the person that convinces someone to join, just like a car ad doesn’t except to immediately sell someone on a car. Unlike a car ad though, you need to treat the person like they are a capricious, independent human being who may for very good reasons, very bad reasons, or random silly reasons decide not to join the Fediverse and still make a genuine connection with that person (no matter how small) whether they join or not. If people sense your motivation for interacting with them is just trying to get them to join a thing, obviously, it is going to feel hollow and the invitation is going to have no weight to it.

I think cold call DMs might work, but if you don’t have any presence in that community as a user (and thus some reason for people to engage with you) than the success rate is going to be very slow.

In the end though, I don’t know, we can’t force the future on people all we can do is keep hanging out in the future and make it as nice a place for people when they finally do decide to come. It could be all at once in a burst like with the reddit-bs, but it could just be slowly with cool people trickling in every once in awhile who actively sought out a community like this.

rglullis,

if you don’t have any presence in that community (…) the success rate is going to be very slow.

Yes, 100% agree. It is key that the people that are “Ambassadors” have an actual connection with the reddit community. Otherwise this just becomes some random spammer writing to people.

It could be all at once in a burst like with the reddit-bs, but it could just be slowly with cool people trickling in every once in awhile

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.

dumpsterlid,

“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.

rglullis,

honestly given the million different ways corporate social media hurts people it is frankly impossible for it not too.

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 fuckups, people still like to complain about Twitter on Twitter, and it’s 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?

Fuck, 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.

dumpsterlid,

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

Suoko,
@Suoko@feddit.it avatar

Is it difficult to create a bot that gets links from reddit and post them on lemmy? Comments are just comments to laugh

rglullis,

For memes and such, no one really cares about comments. But technical subreddits, self-posts and their comments are the most important thing to be preserved.

Suoko,
@Suoko@feddit.it avatar

Technical staff is usually still on technical sites like forums or stackoverflow and similars

LemmyIsFantastic,

Jesus Christ. Can’t get content so you become Jehovah’s witnesses?

lambalicious,

The Fediverse operates in mysterious ways.

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

I do it sometimes when people ar me promoting their creations. Sometimes it works, sometimes not

rglullis,

If “sometimes it works” means anything above “10% of the time”, I’d say then it’s a quite successful strategy.

Which communities would you be interested in picking up?

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

I just usually target my country sub. People are getting more and more annoyed with the number of ads on Reddit, usually that’s a good angle to suggest them alternatives

scytale,

I dunno man, I don’t think many people would appreciate random DMs from people they don’t know, especially ones that are advertising/promoting something. It sounds spam-ish, even if they just receive a message once. Also, I would think a lot of prolific reddit posters have some sort of incentive for doing it (sponsors or just simply addicted to the karma). I don’t think a lot of them will be willing to do the same on a platform that doesn’t really give you any incentive (karma isn’t really a thing and sponsors wouldn’t want to invest in a very small and niche userbase).

Blaze,
@Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

To be fair, just telling people that Lemmy has Sync, Boost versions and Infinity and Apollo forks is enough to have them interested

rglullis,

Yeah, and the one thing that I’m hoping to add soon is a content section to the Fediverser site with the most straightforward way possible to migrate:

  1. Go to alien.top’s portal
  2. Sign-in with reddit
  3. Show them the link to download their favorite client alongside with initial credentials.
  4. Realize that that they are already subscribed to all the subreddits they are used to follow.
  5. Profit.
rglullis, (edited )

If we want to get people out of reddit and into the fediverse, we will need to learn how to advertise and market it for the masses. It doesn’t need to mean that we should be taking a “spray and pray” approach, but if we get ~100 ambassadors for subreddits that fall into the “niche community” (less than 500k subscribers) category and each sends 10 messages per day, even a (low) 10% response rate would mean 100 new users every day. We could even find a way to get converted subscribers to become Ambassador themselves, things would compound quickly.

a lot of prolific reddit posters have some sort of incentive for doing it (sponsors or just simply addicted to the karma)

These posters could be “sold” on the idea not of migrating away, but of extending their reach even further.

Oszilloraptor,

And it can also burn people.

Someone tried to convince me to lemmy in 2022. And until the Reddit-thing this single message was the whole reason I didn’t even thought about joining lemmy. It was weird to me back then.

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