I highly doubt that it will actually make any useful amount of money.

Consider yourself lucky if you manage to break even. I am 5 years into this and the Fediverse side of things have been nothing but a money pit. The only thing that is not keeping me completely in the red is the custom Matrix hosting.

The project site is https://fediverser.io. ;)

In the general case, to get some feedback about the project. What is so bad about it that people feel like it a negative contribution to the community?

In this specific case, because I don't want to get into a "he said/she said" argument about the serial downvoters. So by asking to explain it, the public can gauge by themselves who is being reasonable.

They need to be setup by the homeserver, i.e by the admin of the "instance".

We used Slack and we had a Confluence Wiki. No one bothered to keep Confluence up-to-date because everyone was just used to ask ad-hoc questions on Slack and get an answer by one of the respective team members. We "solved" this issue at one company with one reasonably simple policy: people were free to ask questions on Slack as much as they wanted, but the response should always have a link to the related Confluence page. You could even answer the question directly with a TL;DR, but the Confluence Page link should always be part of the answer.

Every time that there was an Slack response without a link to Confluence, the responder's team would get a mark, and every month the team with the most marks would have to bring something to the rest of the company. Basically, it forced everyone in the team to step up their documentation game, and it got everyone in the spirit of "collaborative editing": sometimes, people would just write create a page with a very basic paragraph. Another team member would use that to extend the answer and so on. In just a few months, every department had a pretty solid documentation space and we even got used to start our questions with "I looked for X on Confluence and didn't find anything. Can someone tell me where I can find info about it?"

So, yes, you are right about the disconnect between "what experienced people want" and "what beginners want", but even in this case it would make sense if most project managers used real-time chat platforms only for initial inquiries and triage, but used this inflow to produce long-term content in a structured document or wiki.

The whole sfw.community instance is aimed at "SFW Porn" communities. It's less about "serious" discussion and more for sharing pictures/videos with little depth.

My choice of present continuous was deliberate.

You being shadowbanned and a site-wide censorship of links to Lemmy are two distinct things.

Oh, if the community exists already even better.

do you have any data on the % of people who chose to take ownership of the accounts that were created for them?

Not really. To do that the system would have to message everyone who posted or commented in any of the threads, and I didn't get to that stage.

My original plan was:

1. Start mirroring the content to bootstrap the communities
2. Get people on Lemmy interacting with the content.
3. Use the interactions from people already on Lemmy as a signal to people on Reddit that they have an audience outside of Reddit. (The original idea was to make Lemmy responses creating DMs to the user to let them know about the Lemmy link). Get the people on Lemmy co-invested in bringing these "higher-value Redditors" to Lemmy.
4. ~~Profit~~. Start seeing a bigger mass of people joining Lemmy via the "fediversed" instances.

This plan stopped at step #2 because I did not expect to have so many people here browsing by "all" and then complaining about the flood of content from the mirrors. So the absolute majority of Reddit users never actually were made aware of the mirrored content. I still think it's illogical, but I gave up on convincing hordes of people by arguing with "logic".

I was just using that as an example of how even users who willingly tried lemmy during the exodus are hard to retain.

Agree, but it's also a problem of pure lack of content. Now that I disabled the mirrors from alien.top, I honestly miss the niche communities that I participated and it is taking quite a bit of willpower to avoid saying "screw it" and re-joining the subs I participated there.

Yeah, it is requesting a lot of things because it's part of the roadmap to actually do them. The next release will have two-way communication, to let people respond to a reddit mirror and send a message to the original redditor.

Keep in mind that the goal of this project is to let people completely replace their reddit usage with their fediverse account, and that will need to let people (for some time) bridge conversations betwern the two platforms.

I will eventually change this so that the reqiests for the actions will be separate, one for connecting and getting the subreddits, another to ask for permission to send messages. I just didn't get the time to do it "properly", yet.

This is why I am not holding my hopes up for Twitter, but I do believe that the Fediverse can work because we can have many different small service providers that would all compete for its customers, and not having ads would be definitely an advantage.