The NFL season is about to start and it would be nice to have as many people as possible participating on the communities from https://nfl.community. Being a topic-specific instance with closed registrations, I'm aware that it is harder to be discovered, so I'm writing here with the intent of both promoting a bit and to find enthusiasts joining in.
If you'd like to help the instance and the team communities grow, there are two ways to help:
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Join https://fediverser.network, find the Lemmy community you want to help and apply to become a Community Ambassador. Community Ambassadors can add different sources of content and also send invites to "good" reddit users to migrate.
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Become a moderator of your team community. The communities are still all low in traffic, so I guess the hardest part for the moderators will be in finding and posting the type of content that you'd like to see in the community, in order to set out its tone.
As always, if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask!
I feel like you are purposely avoiding the question. You previously said:
So how does multiple instances help with that? From my point of view, it makes it much more difficult and more confusing.
That is a false fallacy. We know that is not true from failed blackout. There were multiple platforms that people could have gone to, but didn't. Even outside Fediverse, where complexity of usability is not an issue. A very small minority of people left due to 3rd party clients being killed.
!latteart@lemmy.zip is identical to !rivian@lemmy.zip. I'm the only poster, but it was approved.
I'm just trying to understand what are the criteria. Does criteria from https://communick.news/comment/2934810 also apply to first recommendation or all recommendations? Because there are plenty of recommended communities with solo posters.
Is it better to have no recommendation until some threshold is reached?
All that matches the criteria, whatever they are from the above, but clearly we are in disagreement here.
They don't help, but they don't make it worse.
We can have people on fediverser.network trying to convince redditors to migrate. They will check the website, go through the instance selector, find an instance and register. Hopefully, they will be auto subscribed to the communities that are recommended and be satisfied with what they have.
Let's say we have another fediverser instance deployed by some admin from, e.g, Slovenia. This admin goes and promote their fediverser instance as the best one from Slovenians that want to migrate. There will be no "find my instance selector", because the fediverser instance is already has connected to a specific Lemmy server. The recommended communities has some overlap with fediverser.network, but for some communities they will prefer to recommend the completely local one.
Let's say one of the admins from lemmygrad/hexbear/tankie.social also deploys their own fediverser instance. They will be reaching out to a different subset of redditors, and those redditors will be expecting a different subset of communities.
Three different instances. Three different audiences, all of them with the common goal of getting people to migrate from Reddit to the Fediverse. It doesn't matter from the individual redditor point of view which instance they used to migrate, as long as the recommendations are sound. But if we try to get every redditor to through the same one instance, we will end up satisfying no one.
So you agree that the goal is not to ease people into Fediverse, but to create a clone like experience. Glad we finally got to that.
That's where we disagree. You think a single recommendation is sound and "less confusing" instead of helping people understand what Fediverse is and how it works.
I don't think it's productive, but good luck with the effort.
No, not at all.
You believe that Lemmy is better Reddit because of the things that it can do. I believe that Lemmy can be better than Reddit because of the things that it can not. Do you understand the difference?
Absolutely disagree!
The blackout failed precisely because there were no alternatives that could provide the depth and breath of content to the hundreds of millions of users that Reddit still has.
The majority of people who tried Lemmy during the protests went back to Reddit, and the major reason is simply lack of content in the long tail of diverse interests.
You just said content wasn't the problem:
It makes no sense that the blackout failed because of lack of content, since the content generation would have stopped on Reddit during the blackout. The backlash moderators got from their users for locking subreddits during the blackout was very telling. The reality is, people just don't care enough to switch if it doesn't affect them. And we know that % of people that used 3rd party clients was less than 5%, based on client download numbers it sat at around (6.9%, which counted users that just downloaded it once and never used).
Content can be a motivating factor in bringing in established posters, but even then it's more about the sunk cost fallacy than content. That's why converting lurkers into posters people is the way to grow new platforms. I'm the living proof of that, as I had 0 posts on Reddit.
And there were plenty of alternatives from established ones like Hacker News (founded in 2007) to new ones like Lemmy, Hive, Raddle, Saidit, who were all released before the Reddit changes were even announced.
I don't know if we are talking about the same thing when I say "content was not the problem".
What I mean is that people's objections to Reddit is not in the type of content that they could find there. Overall, people like the conversations they have there and they like the range of communities that were there. And none of the alternatives you mentioned stand on the same footing as Reddit, so there is no pointing in comparing them.
latteart does not have an topic-specific instance that I would consider a better home. rivian does.
It could be. My concern though is that this will lead to just a bunch of communities created around the top 3 largest instances. I strongly believe that one way to avoid network effects acting in favor of any particular instance is by establishing a more clean separation between "instances for people" and "instances for groups".
If I may, lemmy.zip isn't in the top 3 instances. According to https://lemmy.ca/post/26878531, they barely have 3 communities in the 100 most active communities.
And this is why I didn't hesitate to approve some of the recommendations there. Still, "topic-specific instances over generic ones" remains a primary guideline.
Yet, now, it has none.
There is no constancy in how things are applied.
Has 3 recommendations and allows recommending more.
Has 1 and doesn't allow recommending more.
Both are generic topics, but are also broad enough to potentially have topic-based instance. But are treated differently.
I'm starting to come to the conclusion that having a gatekeeper for recommendations is not the right approach. It will always lead to uneven application. Allowing all matching ones eliminates that issue as well as your "top 3 largest instance" concern.
But it's clear that we are in fundamental disagreement here. Time will tell if your effort was successful. Good luck.