this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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Not this again...
Lemmy isn't everyones' cup of tea. Reddit, despite the API shenanigans, still does what people want.
People are not moving here from Reddit if they haven't already. They'd sooner go to Discord. Less cognitive load, and their subs already have servers set up. Lemmy has a 5 communities different servers for each sub and most will be inactive, so it's already a losing battle.
Make Lemmy it's own thing, rather than aspiring to be the 2nd head of the Hydra. Organic growth is good, sustainable. Boom and bust wholesale migrations look like failed hostile takeovers.
I think you're underestimating Reddit's ability to continue degrading the Reddit experience with their ham-fisted attempts to maximize revenue.
I think you're grossly overestimating the ability of FOSS to reach "regular" people. 99.9% of Redditors haven't even heard of Lemmy. There are assuredly very many people using Reddit who would be very happy to switch to something better.
You're not wrong with any of your points, I'm just saying there's no reason to discourage a "get the word out" campaign. People can make their own choices, but only after they know what the options are.
As someone who recently was wondering what my alternatives to Reddit were, then stumbling here recently, I think what we need is a good personality to do a 3 minute YouTube tutorial that gets out on Reddit.
I still don't fully understand the difference between the two, but what I do know is encouraging. But it took effort to discover that difference. Reddit is apathetic. A three minute video may be short enough to get people to understand.
Just needs to show what it looks like (similar to Reddit with sync and I'm sure others), then a brief description of how it differs under the hood, and then how to set up an account and subscribe to a community.
Have a look at this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/1507unf/post_why_dont_reopen_here_completely/
People were being told to move to Lemmy, but they fiercely refused, sometimes being utterly agressive.
And this is a Unixporn community, which is supposed to be aware of FOSS.
I think the problem was Lemmy didn't have the apps in place ready to take advantage of reddits API deadline. Loads of people come to Lemmy but it wasn't up to scratch yet. So they went back to what they already knew.
Now big apps like sync are on board. If they give lemmy another go I reckon they will stay this time.
They open Sync, they they see they can't post, they leave again.
I know post is coming in the next hours, but it's the same for multireddits, instance blocking, account migration, etc.
Assuming the prerequisite of joining Lemmy doesn't skew this, people who post would be a small minitority. Might be similar for the other features you mentioned.
This was basically me. Looked around for an app I liked, couldn't find one for Lemmy but there was an okay-ish open source one for reddit. Used that for awhile but kept an eye on Lemmy.
My only issue now is that i want to ignore an couple instances (lemmynsfw, and the like) but I can't.... Can I? There isn't enough content in "subscribed new" and find I'm going to "all new" but there's too much NSFW... Maybe I'm on here too much.
I had a similar experience.
I'm using "Connect." For every post I see, there's both a "block this community" and "block this instance" option. After I started making use of these, my feed (while still limited) became much more palatable. Presumably other apps have similar functionality, but I cannot comment definitively.
I use Voyager and have had the same experience as you. I blocked some communities from lemmynsfw and now even my feed from all of the fediverse is pretty good.
I think a more appropriate approach is just to mention lemmy to your circles of friends and try to get any redditors you personally know to give lemmy a try, at least get the app installed so they can browse both reddit and lemmy. Lemmy won't be able to handle millions upon millions of new people, especially ones with no guidance, but communities aren't built overnight and we should do our best to get those who could use lemmy to use lemmy, one at a time. We shouldn't be trying to overthrow reddit, just give a viable alternative to those willing to try one. It's the more organic approach.
Grass roots wins Vs marketing.
Make that healthy root system grow!