We’re about to enter another Reddit mass migration phase starting tonight. We’ve already attracted the users most actively engaged with the protests and Reddit’s changes—users who are driven enough to put in the effort to grow the Fediverse.
Now we need to make it feel like home to casual users and lurkers. Not just attract them for a few visits, but keep it interesting enough that they stay here in the coming weeks/months.
Major kudos to all the developers working day and night to bring us familiar-feeling apps and interfaces on insanely short timelines. But what can the rest of us do to make Kbin and Lemmy feel like home to all the new Reddit refugees? Populate Lemmy and Kbin with as much quality content as you can find!
Over the next few weeks, fill your magazines/communities with as much good the content as you can. Post comments and subscribe to things. Click that upvote button on content or comments you like.
Not sure where to find good content? Ironically, check out your favorite subreddits for ideas. Make sure we have the best of the content you can find on Reddit. See a good article or link? Post it here! Don’t be shy about posting to interactive communities like Ask Lemmy- we’re after volume.
For OC Reddit posts, see if there’s a non-Reddit page to post here. I don’t know whether it’s acceptable to copy text posts, but if you do, make sure you at least give credit/copy a link to the original post.
Basically, do everything you can to engage over the next few weeks and avoid lurking. Show off the Fediverse and welcome the next group of Reddit refugees to their new home.
Edit: I completely forgot to call out all the people hosting and upgrading instances to help with the massive influx of users and keep the sites stable. Thank you, hosts!
I think a big part of this is making less of the content on Lemmy, be about Lemmy.
How many casual users are going to join, see literally half of their front page being about either Lemmy or reddit, and then just leave?
Edit: Building on this - I just joined, and my homepage currently has 3 posts that aren’t directly about either Lemmy or reddit.
Same problem with Mastodon.
So many of the most popular posts are self referential - about Mastodon, Twitter or Elon Musk.
Yeah. Sometimes it feels like it’s just people patting themselves on the back for not using Reddit, which is completely ok, but I’d also like to see other stuff. Like from subreddit I used to subscribe to.
I get it. It’s cathartic, and it’s nice to vent about it. It was similar during the digg > Reddit migration and it will naturally end on it’s own, but I do hope it doesn’t last too long.
Yeah, I think it’s partly a coping mechanism and partly just the current drama that everyone’s aware of, which makes it safe common ground to make jokes about, as well as pretty much the only thing most people can be fairly sure they have in common with others on a platform that is pretty new to them. A week or so ago Mastodon was pretty full of Titan stuff. Things will move on again.