We’re about to enter another Reddit mass migration phase starting tonight. We’ve already attracted the users most actively engaged with the protests and Reddit’s changes—users who are driven enough to put in the effort to grow the Fediverse.
Now we need to make it feel like home to casual users and lurkers. Not just attract them for a few visits, but keep it interesting enough that they stay here in the coming weeks/months.
Major kudos to all the developers working day and night to bring us familiar-feeling apps and interfaces on insanely short timelines. But what can the rest of us do to make Kbin and Lemmy feel like home to all the new Reddit refugees? Populate Lemmy and Kbin with as much quality content as you can find!
Over the next few weeks, fill your magazines/communities with as much good the content as you can. Post comments and subscribe to things. Click that upvote button on content or comments you like.
Not sure where to find good content? Ironically, check out your favorite subreddits for ideas. Make sure we have the best of the content you can find on Reddit. See a good article or link? Post it here! Don’t be shy about posting to interactive communities like Ask Lemmy- we’re after volume.
For OC Reddit posts, see if there’s a non-Reddit page to post here. I don’t know whether it’s acceptable to copy text posts, but if you do, make sure you at least give credit/copy a link to the original post.
Basically, do everything you can to engage over the next few weeks and avoid lurking. Show off the Fediverse and welcome the next group of Reddit refugees to their new home.
Edit: I completely forgot to call out all the people hosting and upgrading instances to help with the massive influx of users and keep the sites stable. Thank you, hosts!
Oops, I’m still trying to figure out the formatting for links. Sorry!
The full URL should look something like yourinstancename/c/communityname@articleinstancename. So since you’re on reddthat.com, for you to access !aita@lemmy.world, you’ll need to go to reddthat.com/c/aita@lemmy.world. If you were visiting a community that’s on your own instance, you can drop the @instancename part at the end.
For what instances are, think of it like email. You can have Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, AOL, or any other email client and can send messages to users on any other client since they share the same protocol/language. It’s the same idea here. Every community is hosted on a particular instance, such as reddthat or lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works. Since all instances use the same protocol, a user from any instance can see and interact with content on any other instance (with an exception I’ll get into in a sec).
Back to the email analogy. If someone using Hotmail gets an email from someone using Gmail, the Hotmail user doesn’t actually access Gmail itself to read the message. Instead, Hotmail makes a copy of the message on its own servers for the Hotmail user to read. With the Fediverse, same idea - if you see content originally posted on another instance, you’re technically seeing a copy of that content hosted on your instance. And if you interact with it, like making a post or commenting or even upvoting, you’re doing that on your copy of the content, which is then synced back with the original copy. From there it’s pushed out to all the other copies on all the other instances that are synced to the content. This is what Federation refers to - separate instances hosting different content that all communicate with each other to make a single community out of all its different parts.
The exception to all this direct communication is defederation, which is when two instances don’t talk to each other directly (usually one cuts off the other). This means that users on those instances can’t see or interact with content on the other instance. Defederation is a pretty extreme measure and its use varies instance-to-instance based on the admins. Some instances are pretty quick to defederate (such as Beehaw) but most see defederation as a last resort.
I hope that made sense!