5 ms·

We all know the drill: pick up the shambles of your community. Move to a federated service (lemmy in this case) and try to get as many of your peers to join you

We all know the drill: pick up the shambles of your community. Move to a federated service (lemmy in this case) and try to get as many of your peers to join you there. Actually, subreddits being mapped as lemmy instances makes more sense to me than the "single identity" of reddit.

fastball 3y ago
The problem with that plan is that a huge amount of the value of Reddit was that it was well-indexed by search engines so that when you went searching for something, the conversations from Reddit would pop up, which were generally quite high-quality as far as forum-type content goes. If you move everything to Lemmy, that won't happen much and as a result fewer people will join the community that don't already know about it somehow.
- zo1 3y ago
  I'm sure with enough community-support someone will write a plugin or tool to expose Lemmy content to http pages that can be indexed? I haven't used Lemmy before, but if I was making a Reddit-like clone, that sort of thing would have been baked in from the start.
  - Gareth321 3y ago
    To my knowledge, Lemmy instances can all be crawled by Google already. Using "site:lemmy.world" for example, returns indexed results. It's just that Google's algorithm has received billions of reddit searches for years, so they're biasing Reddit results. This will change organically.
- mlatu 3y ago
  well, what good is it when google indexes ANYTHING? even cohost appears high in results nowadays... and dont get me started about how google includes also crap generated by llms... google is on its course of devalueing itself. the human internet is probably doomed. long live the llm generated internet oh which gives me an idea: fake users as a service: using llm to generate comments for reddit after the dark
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    "fake users as a service: using llm to generate comments for reddit after the dark" I cannot imagine, that this is not already being offered/in use.
    - JayPalm 3y ago
      There’s been the subreddit simulators going back to at least GPT2.
    - mlatu 3y ago
      truth.
- isaacfung 3y ago
  Migrating communities from one platform to another is a lot more complicated than most people assume. Cold start problem: initially the new community has no content archive and only a few users, most people are lazy, it takes time to relearn the ui and set up subscriptions(there is no good way to export/import subscriptions and saved posts) Transfer of moderation: some people are going to take the opportunity to seize ownership of the new community, and the community will split up Discoverability: reddit gets a lot of user traffic from google since google search quality has gone down and people add site:reddit.com to their search We need a new form of social media where users and communities can easily export their content and data. A reddit clone with a similar UI is not enough.
  - notTooFarGone 3y ago
    I was just thinking: Why not a reddit clone with the API data and some sort of claim for accounts via proof of ownership? Just make them comment a special string on reddit to claim your account on the new clone. Clone content and subreddits of the last X days. Shouldn't be toooo hard. Maybe use the reddit links for images and video for the first POC until you can serve them yourself. Moderators could claim their subreddits, people dont lose too much - maybe also migrate your subreddit subscriptions. Sounds like a 1 month job for a good team.
    - joseda-hg 3y ago
      I'd wager site cloning in that scale to be expressly forbidden by Reddit's TOS, I can't see why they wouldn't
      - compscigirl 3y ago
        Isn’t there a 2TB dump of Reddit posts and comments as of February 2023? Couldn’t you that instead of the API to seed your site’s content as a workaround to the TOS?
  - tester457 3y ago
    > We need a new form of social media where users and communities can easily export their content and data. A reddit clone with a similar UI is not enough. If a site allowed imports how would it work? It could work for all of a user's top level tweets, but for something with threads like reddit I don't see any solution.
esskay 3y ago
> lemmy in this case Lemmys far too immature to take over Reddits position. Even with 24/7 development (Which isnt happening) its not going to get to a strong enough position to take over for a long time. It'd have been like Mastodon trying to step in to take over Twitter in 2017.
- rkangel 3y ago
  I agree with you, but I am actually finding some enjoyment in using something that's at an earlier stage. I'm not normally the early-adopter type and Lemmy does fundamentally work - its issues are missing features rather than bugs. I also don't think Lemmy is too far from the prime time. Based on my usage over the last week, its perfectly usable and I think it needs two things for it to get to the point where I could just tell a non-technical friend to join without a long explanation of things they need to know: * A better approach and advice for which instance to register on. https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/ is OK but isn't the ideal landing page for someone who isn't a SW engineer * Better handling of links to posts/communities on other instances, so that you end up on the view from your instance and you can more easily upvote, reply etc. There's a few options here, but one would be to fully adopt the !community@instance notation, rewrite links in posts into that form, and when displaying posts generate the link to your instance. There's also the more general federation problem (that Mastodon also has) of finding something via Google or similar, and then if you want to follow you have to go back and search in your own instance. Browser extensions can solve this, but I don't know if that is sufficient.
- microtonal 3y ago
  I think it depends a lot on the use case. For me there are two Reddits: the large, wildly popular subreddits with a lot of meming, etc. These are probably where the bulk of users are. And probably what Reddit the company is most interested in. These users care less about third-party clients and fit in well with Reddit as a social media company. The other Reddit is one of small niche communities with hundreds or thousands of subscribers, but where a lot of experts of that niche hang out and comment. Pretty much like old web forums. Lemmy looks (I have only joined yesterday) good enough to serve that type of Reddit. And I think at least tech niche subreddits are somewhat inclined to jump ship, since they are more principled about third-party client, etc. It's similar to Mastodon and Twitter. Twitter hasn't collapsed (yet) and Mastodon hasn't taken over its role. However, many tech folks have jumped ship. My Twitter feed (especially with recommendations) is now mostly tech bros and influencers with hot takes on LLMs. My Mastodon feed is mostly high-quality, insightful tech posts. And in contrast to before Elon took over Twitter, it's not a ghost town anymore.

fastball 3y ago

The problem with that plan is that a huge amount of the value of Reddit was that it was well-indexed by search engines so that when you went searching for something, the conversations from Reddit would pop up, which were generally quite high-quality as far as forum-type content goes. If you move everything to Lemmy, that won't happen much and as a result fewer people will join the community that don't already know about it somehow.

zo1 3y ago
I'm sure with enough community-support someone will write a plugin or tool to expose Lemmy content to http pages that can be indexed? I haven't used Lemmy before, but if I was making a Reddit-like clone, that sort of thing would have been baked in from the start.
- Gareth321 3y ago
  To my knowledge, Lemmy instances can all be crawled by Google already. Using "site:lemmy.world" for example, returns indexed results. It's just that Google's algorithm has received billions of reddit searches for years, so they're biasing Reddit results. This will change organically.
mlatu 3y ago
well, what good is it when google indexes ANYTHING? even cohost appears high in results nowadays... and dont get me started about how google includes also crap generated by llms... google is on its course of devalueing itself. the human internet is probably doomed. long live the llm generated internet oh which gives me an idea: fake users as a service: using llm to generate comments for reddit after the dark
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  "fake users as a service: using llm to generate comments for reddit after the dark" I cannot imagine, that this is not already being offered/in use.
  - JayPalm 3y ago
    There’s been the subreddit simulators going back to at least GPT2.
  - mlatu 3y ago
    truth.
isaacfung 3y ago
Migrating communities from one platform to another is a lot more complicated than most people assume. Cold start problem: initially the new community has no content archive and only a few users, most people are lazy, it takes time to relearn the ui and set up subscriptions(there is no good way to export/import subscriptions and saved posts) Transfer of moderation: some people are going to take the opportunity to seize ownership of the new community, and the community will split up Discoverability: reddit gets a lot of user traffic from google since google search quality has gone down and people add site:reddit.com to their search We need a new form of social media where users and communities can easily export their content and data. A reddit clone with a similar UI is not enough.
- notTooFarGone 3y ago
  I was just thinking: Why not a reddit clone with the API data and some sort of claim for accounts via proof of ownership? Just make them comment a special string on reddit to claim your account on the new clone. Clone content and subreddits of the last X days. Shouldn't be toooo hard. Maybe use the reddit links for images and video for the first POC until you can serve them yourself. Moderators could claim their subreddits, people dont lose too much - maybe also migrate your subreddit subscriptions. Sounds like a 1 month job for a good team.
  - joseda-hg 3y ago
    I'd wager site cloning in that scale to be expressly forbidden by Reddit's TOS, I can't see why they wouldn't
    - compscigirl 3y ago
      Isn’t there a 2TB dump of Reddit posts and comments as of February 2023? Couldn’t you that instead of the API to seed your site’s content as a workaround to the TOS?
- tester457 3y ago
  > We need a new form of social media where users and communities can easily export their content and data. A reddit clone with a similar UI is not enough. If a site allowed imports how would it work? It could work for all of a user's top level tweets, but for something with threads like reddit I don't see any solution.

esskay 3y ago

> lemmy in this case Lemmys far too immature to take over Reddits position. Even with 24/7 development (Which isnt happening) its not going to get to a strong enough position to take over for a long time. It'd have been like Mastodon trying to step in to take over Twitter in 2017.

rkangel 3y ago
I agree with you, but I am actually finding some enjoyment in using something that's at an earlier stage. I'm not normally the early-adopter type and Lemmy does fundamentally work - its issues are missing features rather than bugs. I also don't think Lemmy is too far from the prime time. Based on my usage over the last week, its perfectly usable and I think it needs two things for it to get to the point where I could just tell a non-technical friend to join without a long explanation of things they need to know: * A better approach and advice for which instance to register on. https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/ is OK but isn't the ideal landing page for someone who isn't a SW engineer * Better handling of links to posts/communities on other instances, so that you end up on the view from your instance and you can more easily upvote, reply etc. There's a few options here, but one would be to fully adopt the !community@instance notation, rewrite links in posts into that form, and when displaying posts generate the link to your instance. There's also the more general federation problem (that Mastodon also has) of finding something via Google or similar, and then if you want to follow you have to go back and search in your own instance. Browser extensions can solve this, but I don't know if that is sufficient.
microtonal 3y ago
I think it depends a lot on the use case. For me there are two Reddits: the large, wildly popular subreddits with a lot of meming, etc. These are probably where the bulk of users are. And probably what Reddit the company is most interested in. These users care less about third-party clients and fit in well with Reddit as a social media company. The other Reddit is one of small niche communities with hundreds or thousands of subscribers, but where a lot of experts of that niche hang out and comment. Pretty much like old web forums. Lemmy looks (I have only joined yesterday) good enough to serve that type of Reddit. And I think at least tech niche subreddits are somewhat inclined to jump ship, since they are more principled about third-party client, etc. It's similar to Mastodon and Twitter. Twitter hasn't collapsed (yet) and Mastodon hasn't taken over its role. However, many tech folks have jumped ship. My Twitter feed (especially with recommendations) is now mostly tech bros and influencers with hot takes on LLMs. My Mastodon feed is mostly high-quality, insightful tech posts. And in contrast to before Elon took over Twitter, it's not a ghost town anymore.