Ask Lemmy
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Is that still true with easy export? It sounds like that server effectively controls the fediverse until it doesn't.
What do you mean by easy export? I haven't been keeping up with recent Lemmy updates because SJW is still running 0.19.5.
But if that's some way to transfer your account to another server, that helps a little bit, but the more difficult thing is to migrate the communities to a new server. AFAIK you would have to start the communities from scratch with 0 posts and 0 subscribers, and that takes a long time to build back up.
Can be done in a few days if you warn the community beforehand and keep them informed where to go.
[email protected] is a good recent example from [email protected]
The difficulty corresponds to the size and activity of the community. With all due respect, that's an extremely small community, and they've still only gotten to around 20% of their original subscriber base. For more active communities, rebuilding the subscribers will be even more difficult. Luckily for us, most communities on Lemmy are relatively small, so transplantation can definitely be done for many of them.
However, when it comes to major communities, rebuilding the subscribers still isn't enough, because you lose all of the post and comment history no matter what you do. Major communities (c/memes, c/greentext, c/news, even something like c/eurographicnovels) cannot be quickly rebuilt in such a manner, you inevitably have to start from scratch. They represent the combined effort and activity of many people over many months, in making quality posts, making quality comments, and upvoting and downvoting the content judiciously so that the cream rises to the top. You could recreate them and try to copy all the posts to the new community with a bot in a single day, but that would be a pale imitation of the actual community as it existed over a period of time, because everything would have 0 upvotes and 0 engagement.
Thanks for the reminder to resubscribe to the new c/sideoftheroad though.
Not sure that's relevant. They used to have 915 active users for the last 6 months on the old one, they just reached 937 for this month on the new one, so I guess most of the people interested moved. Subscribers numbers are inflated as a large number of accounts aren't active anymore.
Why not? The main issue with the first version of a community is to get enough people in the same place. Once this is achieved, you can just announce that you are going to move, point to the new community, and then post the new content on the new community.
It even happens now with [email protected] which was created after some powertripping by the admin of [email protected]. In this case, it's a bit different, as both communities are still open, but the fact that most of the people who posted to the old community switched to the new is enough to give the new community 2.85k monthly active users, while the old one only has 2.72k.
No need to transfer the old content, give the votes, and all of that. People just want to be where the new content is posted.
!remindme to check their activity numbers 6 months from now and see how they compare. Hopefully it will be higher but I wouldn't bet on it.
That's the friction point. Most people aren't as active as you are and tend to miss those kinds of announcements. Or they see an announcement and they scroll right past. That's where you lose 90% of subscribers.
I wasn't subscribed to the dbzer0 meme community, and I don't expect it to replace the original one. Without knowing anything about what went down, I think y'all should just keep posting in the original community. But I will reluctantly subscribe for the time being, only because I greatly enjoy my LOTR memes and I don't want to miss any good ones.
I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying that it's very disruptive and should only be done as a last resort, because many Lemmy communities are fragile as is, and we don't have enough activity to fill the communities that already exist. Trying to break off communities and replace communities is a dangerous game, and shouldn't be encouraged to solve minor problems, but only for major, unavoidable problems. People are going to do what they want no matter what I say, but that's my advice.
As a side note, [email protected] are not moving for fun or to avoid power tripping. They are moving because the instance of their old community is closing.
So it's rather nice to see them successfully moving that way, as unfortunately it will probably happen again in the future for other instances
Why do you want to check in 6 months? They moved 3 days ago, up to that point they were still posting on the old one, so the 6 months activity for the old community is all the activity there was. Or am I missing something?
https://sh.itjust.works/post/29284968?scrollToComments=true
You can have a look and assess whether that was "major" enough. But that's the way activity works on Lemmy: the people posting are free to go to another community whenever they want, and when they leave, the old community usually dies.
Usually the user numbers will start off really strong when a community is initially founded (especially if its a transplantation) and then drop off significantly in the following months. There's typically a surge of posts which attracts users from /all and /new, but those users eventually filter out as the content slows down.
Yeah I mean that's more or less what I assumed, not really major enough for me.
You're not wrong and this has happened many times, also with c/anime leaving from lemmy.ml. But that doesn't mean things will always go that way. The posters have a lot of power sure, but the casual users also have a lot more influence than you might think. Most people aren't going to follow power posters to the ends of the earth, they'll simply engage with the content that is most readily available to them, and they really don't want to bother with splinter communities and moderation drama.
We'll see!
There's definitely several factors at hand. If only a few power posters move away, then the old community will probably stay prevalent. If there's no more content, it will die. You mention All and New, and those are definitely where people see the new communities. It's not the end of the world, some users might not even notice the community change and just vote/comment on the top posts of the day, wherever they are.
But there is indeed the network effect. [email protected] is still the main Linux community, even though [email protected] and [email protected] exist.