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).

  • tebicat@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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    1 year ago

    i don’t think we need bigger instances, i think we need more instances, and a better, streamlined process for finding instances

    • Mjb@lemmy.mlEnglish
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      1 year ago

      Lemmy’s current approach to finding off-instance communities is a UX nightmare.

      To the average, non-techy user pasting !<community>@<instance_url> to get No results despite knowing that community exists is… Offputting. Lemmy should not be showing No results while waiting to federate content, and it should be health-checking a search term before returning anything. A single request to <instance_url>/c/<community> would reveal it exists, and prevent this terrible No results response entirely.

    • pineapple@lemmy.pineapplemachine.comEnglish
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      1 year ago

      i don’t think we need bigger instances, i think we need more instances, and a better, streamlined process for finding instances

      For one thing, it might be nice if individual instances could assign tags or categories, and if pages like join-lemmy.org/instances could allow users to browse the list of instances with a given tag. Then prospective users could choose a tag that best represents their interests, and have an easy list of instances related to that tag.

    • Korgen@kbin.korgen.xyz
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Camus@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Join-lemmy should probably change from number of users to load of the server. People would prefer to go for healthy servers

    • BikerJared@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Illecors@lemmy.cafeEnglish
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    1 year ago

    I am a sysadmin by trade and run a bunch of stuff at home already. I’ve spun up a small cloud instance at lemmy.cafe to check it out and so far - so good. I’m absolutely up for expanding the resource capacity to a point, but ideally would prefer to not be the only one footing the bill.

    This reply is in response to

    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.

    I know from some previous experience that it’s really difficult to attract any donations, especially on a new (to absolute majority or new users) product AND not the main instance.

  • tom@lemmy.caEnglish
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    1 year ago

    Having feature-rich apps that provide good user experiences will also be vital. Mlem and Jerboa are both open source, and could likely use contributors

    • kevin@beehaw.orgEnglish
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      1 year ago

      We just released a big new update to Jerboa that adds a lot of much needed features and polish. We had 14 new contributors too!