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Dear Lemmings, how can we funnel reddit users to lemmy?
(lemmy.world)
Please, help us to better understand how we can effectively funnel reddit users into Lemmy across all demographics, leveraging the average Lemmings advantages like expertise in automation, ai and bots?
What tactics/strategies do you propose? Can we automate the process? Can we somehow add ai to make it more fashionable?
If you just funnel reddit users onto Lemmy, you're just going to get a shittier version of Reddit. You'll be selecting for people who are tired of, can't use, or rejected from reddit, but didn't make the move on their own. That will result in growth, but at the cost of quality. Specifically reaching out to reddit users sends the message that you just want to be reddit for people who can't or won't use reddit anymore.
Expansion should come naturally. As Lemmy grows and improves, new users will naturally gravitate over, but because it wasn't some sudden influx of reddit users they'll be less inclined to just bring Reddit's culture with them.
Aren't all Lemmy users former redditaries?
But before Reddit, I was a Goon. Before that, I ran some forums. Before that, I was on Usenet for ages.
The platforms change, but the people and communities are pretty much the same as they were 30 years ago.
That simply isn't true. Reddit is much larger and more diverse than Usenet. I'm willing to bet the vast majority had never heard of Usenet when they started using Reddit, though they probably heard about it along with hundreds of other new and old ideas after joining. If you think everyone you want to talk to is already here, I'm happy for you, but I think it's a limited philosophy.
The difference lies in how we got here. One means finding a new community, assessing it, and integrating into it. It means seeing the new community as distinctly not Reddit. The other is effectively a "Come as you are" invitation that will just directly import reddit's culture, after which it will be effectively too late to trim less desirable behaviors.
Then we could still funnel new users from other sources that are more like-minded. Say FOSS community and hackers for example (incidentally those are proabably a large chunk of Lemmy users)
No, why would we force them to join. Funneling makes it somewhat sound like forcing our tricking people to go and join lemmy. I would rather that people do it on their own. That way we get genuine lemmings not transplanted reddit trash.