Arguments to support the idea:
- According to browse.feddit.de, this is the largest community for showcasing electronics projects, the last post is almost one month old.
- People that signup to alien.top via the fediverserver portal will have this community as the recommended alternative to /r/electronics, but they will pretty much never see it if the community does not have any fresh content and will be more likely to lose interest.
- Despite the usual criticism of mirroring bots, the way that the fediverser tool works is showing to actually help interaction. In the past two weeks, I’m seeing an above average increase of subscriber and (more importantly) user count on communities like [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected]
The community already exists, it’s just that they are located in a place where we don’t want to be. The goal is to get the majority to switch and re-center in a place that is determined by the intolerant minority.
Which is true, if we are being honest. And if we are being even more honest with ourselves, most of the people that came to Lemmy are going back to Reddit because there is no content for the niche communities here. I mean, look at this community: last post is from 27 days ago. Do you really think that it is doing well by itself?
We had over 100k MAU in July. We are down to 35k and it keeps going down.
Our problem should not be with the people on reddit, but reddit itself. Instead of pretending that we don’t care about the people there, we should try to find ways to bring them here.
The comment would not be coming from a bot account, it would come from the redditor who have used the “Fediverser portal” to connect the accounts (and given permission to send comments) so it would also be “organic”.
Both of us are just going to have to acknowledge that our thoughts around online communities are very different.
Back in June I was thinking along the same lines as your good self, as in “what can we do to move /r/whatever to whateverinstance.tld/c/whatever”. I eventually realised that not only is that not possible, it’s antithetical to the idea of online communities.
An online community is not a set of users, it’s a combination of culture and momentum. Sure there might be a few key core personalities that everyone recognises from day to day, but if those users left the community would continue because it has an established culture and momentum - a collective recollection that this is the place to go for a certain flavor of content and engagement with that content.
The thing is, you can’t force it. You can’t create a culture because it’s a combined input from many people. All you can do is create the environment within which the right type of culture will coalesce. You can’t herd the swarm of bees that is /r/electronics to /c/electronics. All you can do is make /c/electronics the most favorable place to build a hive and have confidence that /r/electronics is becoming less favorable over time.
The solution I’m proposing is to post real actual content. Subscribe to some rss feeds, look at old magazines, ponder questions for discussion. Any single post like this has 100 times the value of something re-posted from reddit.
That’s one metric. It doesn’t feel like content and engagement has really reduced much in the last several months. Honestly I suspect that the orchestrators of the influx of bots in July have realised that other platforms are more fertile for scams and manipulation et cetera.
Besides which, even if valued users are leaving, that’s kind of disappointing but a re-post bot isn’t going to change that. The kinds of community builders you’re looking for are critical thinkers like your good self putting effort into building good communities.
Foregive me, I’m not familiar with alien.top - I’ll have to take a look.
Technically, such a bridge is going to be interesting I guess and I have to concede that in some cases it might facilitate discussion.
That said, it’s still based on the (IMO flawed) premise that mirroring content from reddit is the right move. From my impractical purist / idealist perspective. Lemmy should not seek to be new-reddit. Just let lemmy be lemmy - allow it’s culture and communities to emerge and coalesce in their own time.
Agree, 100%.
Agree, 100%.
That’s where we disagree. Not because I don’t think there is value in what you are saying. There absolute is value and it is very important that we have real people doing. But I don’t think this is enough.
The problem is that we can not do that for all of the interests that we have. Do you know the rule of “1/9/90” of social media? I had about 40 subreddits I was subscribed to, and I would post to 1 or 2 (rarely), comment on about 5 (more frequently) and just lurk around the rest. /r/electronics is in the latter category.
I mean, go look at my profile history. I think I posted more than 300 posts with content from many different communities. My past time this summer was to find different content to post in the different communities I was subscribed to or even that I created myself. I would sometimes even go out of my way to make a post about something where I knew I wouldn’t get the answer, but I thought it would be better to write it down as a way to show some signs of life. And you still think that I should “go read some books so I can ask questions”?
No, I’m sorry. That is just too much. It is a lot easier (and effective) to just write a tool that can bring the content in the format that I want, and hope that it can be useful for others.
The thing is, this tool is definitely built for the 90%, and the reason that it is working it precisely because of that. I am closer to leave reddit altogether because this tool lets me read things here. The more people are able to do this, the more the network effects will kick in and the easier it will be for the communities to move. It won’t be “forced”, but we will get to the point where the majority will be able to say “it’s fine either way by me, so I might as well do it from lemmy”.