Bots potentially might be effected by the API changes coming in a couple weeks. Personally, I think we could benefit from a few utility bots like AutoMod, AutoTldr, RemindMe, WikiLink. (None of those would rely on Reddit either)

If we wanted bots to automatically bring in content, we should just pull news/posts directly from sources instead of going through Reddit. I could totally see something like an NPR bot.

We just have to be careful with the bots that push content to the site here. We don’t want to flood communities and dilute where discussions are happening. I’ve looked at some other Reddit alternatives and they’ve done that to themselves. They might have tons of recent posts but they all have 0 to 1 comments on them with no other engagement.

Gotta convince some of the tech guys coming over from Reddit to spin up their own Lemmy instances so we can properly be distributed and share the load.

What would they be migrating to? Neither Lemmy nor Tildes seems to want to take on a mass exodus. Both have said they are not Reddit replacements and they don’t want to be either. I’ve been trying to figure out where people are actually headed to. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, outside?

It seems like the main driving factor in Reddit’s downfall is simple: money. They are making decisions that we the users hate because they think it’ll make them look more attractive to investors when they go public later this year.

Personally, I think Lemmy just has to avoid corporate greed, bending the knee to advertisers, and not allowing extremists on its platform (or at least forcing them to their own instance that can be de-federated). The first two shouldn’t be an issue for Lemmy as long as it is able to stay funded by users. The third seems like a constant struggle for every platform nowadays.

The whole situation doesn’t really make sense to me anyways. It’s not like Reddit isn’t currently pulling in a bunch of revenue. They also have been a private company since what, 2005? I know the answer for going public is “more money” but I’m like you I can’t think of an instance where a public company has done something for the good of its users.

It really does seem like open source user owned systems are the way of the future. We’ve been burned too many times by corporations at this point. Here’s hoping we don’t have to rely on ads and sponsors to keep the fediverse running.

It’s why Apple is popular, ease of use for the average person is important. The more streamlined and fool proof you can make things, the easier the adoption is. (Apple might have been a bad example because their whole thing is much more complex)

Having been on Reddit for about 10 years now, I would say the need/want for Mastodon/Lemmy/etc to be bigger is to have more variety and more volume in content.

That being said, I also remember my early days on the internet participating on small forums. There was a sense of familiarity and community that I simply haven’t felt on big social media sites.

I also work in software, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the federation concept. There are a lot of buzzwords thrown around.

I remember when I first signed up for Reddit it just asked for a username and a password then boom you were in.

To get started on lemmy, the process isn’t quite so straightforward. I’m new here, like 20 minutes new, and I’ve already seen some people suggest that we should push new users into looking for new instances to sign up on (push them away from lemmy.ml and beehaw.org). There already is the knowledge hurdle of instances, accounts, communities, local/all, federation, etc. It’s not going to be easy to grow the user base if the vibe is that it is set up like some tech bro crypto scam.

I’ve seen some discussion already starting about that. The general answer I’ve seen is, “if you don’t like the rules or how it is being run, join or create a new instance.” Which like… I understand that is a “benefit” of federated content but that answer to governance leaves a lot to be desired.

I think that having more than a handful of mods and the users having a way to remove a troublesome mod would be a couple potential solutions. Reddit has that issue with their mods, if you have a mod causing trouble pretty much the only thing you can do is make a new subreddit. (I suppose that is true here too, you can just move to a new instance but that seems like a drastic solution)