When reddit goes dark on Monday, there will be a horde of people looking for an alternative. When the APIs go dark at the end of the month, another horde will come. When /u/spez says just about anything, it’ll happen again. What can we do to prep here for that? How can we attract good moderators to moderate communities here?
Just listing things I noticed from the twitter/mastodon migration:
- Mastodon had a few thousand signups per hour during the peak times.
- Having a single instance (or even a small number) really simplifies the signup process. How can we scale lemmy.ml and other big instances now to prep for Monday?
- I’m seeing communities already pop up (/c/earthporn, /c/photography and my favorite /c/jeep). If we can keep content flowing through some of the big communities, it’ll help people come back on Tuesday. (On a Sunday night at 7pm MDT, the backend on lemmy.ml is getting crushed and posting is haphazardly working for me…)
- A good intro doc would help folks get up to speed faster (this is how lemmy/fediverse works, he’s a list of mobile apps you can use, here’s how to sign up on patreon… etc).
Scaling lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, and lemmy.one (those are the ones mentioned in the pinned post for “joining”) is probably the biggest priority. If owners of these instances need money to pay for server fees, expertise with server migrations, deployments, scaling, dev work, etc, they really need to communicate.
The proverbial “call to arms” would be appropriate.
We’ve got lots of super nerdy folks here that can donate time/money. Personally, I’m not sure how I can help right now. (Currently subbed on Patreon, but that’s it).
Setting up an instance isn’t too bad, but it involves so much technical know-how, that a significant push to people self hosting their own instances probably isn’t going to work out. If you know what a VPS is, know how to SSH, know how to get an HTTPS certificate, chances are you can read the docs and figure out how to get an instance running.
That’s not really the issue though, the main issue is having some form of cohesion of communities. Lemmy is federated, but it’s never going to take off if all these different communities continue to stay small and fragmented. And those larger communities need to handle all those extra posts and users, meaning their single server needs the resources to handle that demand. It’s the centralization problem all over again.
I run my own instance, and while it’s not hard to federate, it’s cumbersome (I have to add new communities… to the search bar? What? Why?)
I would have expected to be able to drop in the name of a Lemmy instance, fetch a list of the top communities, and add the ones I want. You can’t do this though, you have to add each individual “sublemmy” entirely by hand. It’s tedious, and it makes discoverability nearly impossible.
Until that problem is solved, and until the Lemmy project finds some better clever way to organize similar interests across different instances ([email protected] and [email protected] need some kind of way to merge), I don’t think it will be largely successful. We need a way of creating large, active communities, without so much friction between “what server is it on?” It needs to be seamless, so we can distribute the cost to operate across all our instances, so no single entity feels like they need to keep throwing money at their server provider.
The best way to support Lemmy is to start drafting those PRs to make it better and to get closer to that sort of system.
Mastodon during the twitter migration had a problem where folks were standing up instances, but new users were having trouble finding them, or overwhelmed with lots of “interest-based” instances. Most users don’t care about a “furry” specific instance, or an instance focused on San Francisco Donut enthusiasts. They just want an instance.
Another problem is as time went on, some of those instances shut down abruptly and wiped out accounts for folks. Having a few centralized and supported instances at first will help solve that problem as well.
I have the technical know how, given a “GettingStarted.md” file to read to stand up an instance, but I’d rather put my time/energy into supporting an existing one. Dealing with the horde of people currently joining and about to join will require some coordination.
Federation is a strength… but also a weakness. Lemmy is amazing but seems to have a potential - almost a default path - that’ll lead to proliferation of instances and fragmentation of communities, exactly as you’re flagging. This will hardly be in the best interest of broad adoption.
Whether merging of communities across multiple instances is possible on the back-end or not (I have no clue myself), it’ll likely boil down to how the front-end apps do it. A smart, usable UI could “cross the streams” to a degree. Though, I have no idea what that would mean for moderation and even posting.
On one hand, Lemmy basically is not ready for the influx. On the other, is anyone ever really ready when shit goes down? Right now is the purest opportunity this platform is going to get.
It’s great to see this issue being raised now. The future of the platform will be determined by how quickly we can move to address some of these things. While there’s almost no time to prepare, there’s no earlier moment than now!
Lemmy directory kind of addresses this issue. They federate every instance, so if you look at their federated communities, you have quite a good idea of the biggest communities across the Lemmyverse
https://lemmy.directory/communities/listing_type/All/page/1
There already is a lemmy PR proposing the community auto-merge idea, it’s here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113 . It’s very unlikely it can be implemented by Monday, though.
Completely agree that community fragmentation and discovery are the two biggest problems. I don’t expect those problems to be fixed by Monday.
We’ll get some new members, but I doubt we’ll see non-technical people joining in droves. But it could provide a solid enough user-base to create enough content and activity to sustain the space while it continues to improve.
Personally, I think a really good client app could soften the blow of the existing discovery and fragmentation issues. I see a future where an app like Apollo merges identically-named communities in the UI and the end-user doesn’t need to care about which instance the post is on. But codebase improvements could help facilitate that, I expect.