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).
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.