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).
The mistake is gathering at the bigger instances instead of picking smaller ones.
People just tend to gravitate to the biggest instances. Whatever is at the top of join-lemmy will probably be the ones hit the hardest.
Join-lemmy should probably change from number of users to load of the server. People would prefer to go for healthy servers
Or local ones. I specifically looked for a Canadian one as they tend to not be super huge.
Long term, I agree – the whole point of the fediverse is to distribute the user base, moderation capacity, etc. Initially though, we’re just trying to make it as easy as possible to for folks to discover lemmy and use it.
Sending them on a wild goose chase to find an instance and sign up complicates that. Getting them to come back the next day is also way harder when that experience sucks.