Slightly off-topic, but how are you finding encouraging Reddit users to make the switch to Lemmy?
I mod r/futurology, which is close to 20 million subscribers, but most of the growth for futurology.today has come from within the fediverse. Any tips for encouraging Redditors to migrate?
Yes, its hard to understand. On the other hand our results on cloudflare look way too good to be true. They say the fediverse site had 180K unique visitors in its first month and almost 3 million of what it calls “total requests”.
It’s hard to figure out what this means in terms of how many people on the fediverse are seeing the content, both from our site, and where its coming up in federated instances.
and why would they? … they are pretty happy with what they have now.
Exactly. Only a very small number of people are motivated as the pioneers who’ve setup the fediverse now are. Again looking at this through the lens of r/futurology & our fediverse site. Why would a user also want to go to a second version of the exact same thing, but way, way smaller.
My hunch is that long-term the fediverse will prosper. Reddit still isn’t too bad even with these changes, at least not compared to what an absolute shithole Twitter has become.
But people who care about making it bigger, should be asking themselves hard questions - this meme comes across as very complacent & out of touch, if many people really believe the sentiments it’s expressing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/15wi75l/rfuturology_is_now_in_the_fediverse_at/
It’s hard to know exactly how many people see them from the stats Reddit gives Mods. Reddit gives a figure within the post for views, which stands at about 160,000 for the post I mentioned. That includes the times people have been served the title in their feed & and the times people clicked on it (sadly Reddit doesn’t differentiate further).
The fediverse site has been going for 6 weeks and has about 620 subscribers. My guestimate from looking at addresses in comments is that maybe 100-150 are reddit migrants. So roughly speaking 1 in 1000 r/futurology people who saw something about our fediverse site were motivated to join.
A sobering thought for people who think the fediverse is about to crush reddit.
I think fediverse people are wildly overestimating how much 99% of Reddit users care about this. The mod team on r/futurology (I’m one of them) set up a fediverse site just over a month ago (here you go - https://futurology.today/ ) It’s been modestly successful so far, but the vast majority of subscribers seem to be coming from elsewhere in the fediverse, not migrants from Reddit.
This is despite the fact we’ve permanently stickied a post to the top of the sub. r/futurology has over 19 million subscribers, and yet the fediverse is only attracting a tiny trickle of them. I doubt most people on Reddit even know what the word fediverse means.
I think I might try that approach, you’re right it could motivate a subset of people. We have a pinned post spot at the top of the sub-reddit I’m going to use again in a few days. When I used it before, I’d guess a few thousand people read the post, but it seemed to generate very few people moving to the Lemmy site.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/15wi75l/rfuturology_is_now_in_the_fediverse_at/