I’m pretty happy with the experience on Lemmy so far as I joined even before the blackouts started happening. The trigger was the dumpster fire of an AMA with the CEO. I tried kbin first because it’s supposed to be newer and more interoperable with other federated platforms but I found the instance I was on wouldn’t properly load content from Lemmy and I couldn’t find a kbin Android app. So I’ll be here for the time being.
During the shitstorm on Twitter and the exodus to Mastodon, I tried out Mastodon and felt that it was a similarly welcoming experience. But I kept reading comments on Reddit that the Fediverse was too complicated and it was too hard to find people to follow because you needed their username as well as their instance to find them. I hope people have realised that it’s not that much harder during this current Reddit shitshow.
Everyone understands that Reddit/Lemmy/kbin is built on community, and the growth of this community has been fostered by moderators, not Reddit itself. So my question to any subreddit moderators is: Is there something about the Fediverse that would prevent you from moving your community off Reddit? It seems pretty clear that people will try Reddit alternatives even before their favourite subreddits have moved. Users are engaged with the communities that you have built and loyal to the 3rd party app developers and we don’t give a fuck about Reddit as an organisation.
Discussion open to everyone, but curious to know if any moderators are also using Lemmy.
The subreddits I moderate are all quite small (about 2-5k subscribers) and on relatively obscure topics. For now the Lemmy communities I’ve started are on pretty broad, general topics. I’ll consider official moves for them if the Lemmy userbase gets big enough or if Reddit really does die.
I would have thought that being a moderator of a small subreddit would mean that you would be in a position where your users would follow you, rather than the other way around. Did you participate in the blackout? Did you get about feedback from your users about whether they support the protest?
I didn’t end up doing it due to having a pretty hectic week at work (put in my resignation) and also because I’m not sure it would have made much impact (almost all of the new posts were blog spam). I got these subs through r/redditrequest so I wouldn’t have quite the same influence as if I built them from scratch. My main motivation for taking them in the first place is that there really aren’t any other open discussion forums for these topics elsewhere on the internet.