We had a few such attempts in the past, but experience shows that Reddit mods have limited influence on that. Even if they are really trying to move over people it ends up being only a small minority and after a few weeks/months they all go back.

What we need is more homegrown communities that grow naturally by attracting people.

This is one of those things that I’m planning to work on more actively soon!

I think it can be an effective way to help people find Lemmy, and it will work better if that the focus is on letting people know that the option exists (rather than being pushy about it).

Which community to work with

IMO it’s the best community to work on might be one that you are already familiar or active with. If you have a good reputation with the mods already, they will be more likely to listen to your idea. Similarly, some subreddits will benefit from having a space on Lemmy more than others.

What benefits to highlight

I’ve been busy with some other things for some time, but when I was last working on this with a few subreddits, the main benefits were:

• A lot of users don’t want to have to use Reddit, and many have already stopped using Reddit. Having a similar community without ads/tracking with the same moderation team will go a long way to helping those people stay involved

• A well known backup community is very helpful. Some subreddits serve important purposes and even temporary outages on Reddit can affect time sensitive questions. Meanwhile, there have been cases where entire subreddits were removed in error (ex. automated systems reacting to mass reporting), and users had no idea what happened. It’s helpful to have a second place that everyone knows to check for updates in those situations.

Potential process

• bring up the idea, and offer to help with the set up and day to day moderation
• work with the current mods to make moderation consistent between the platforms, so that the experience is similar
• see if some of the mods want to make accounts here so that they can rest easy knowing they have moderation permissions here, even if they don’t use it day to day

Once both communities are linked, there’s a chance for trust to build and users will feel more comfortable knowing that the Fediverse community is an ‘official’ one. That can be helped by having information in the sidebar, a pinned post, and/or a note on the submission page, etc.

Day to Day

This requires having an account on Reddit and being somewhat active on it. Users are more likely to explore the fediverse if they see content from it. Some ideas could be

• A weekly “here’s what you missed from Lemmy”

• Sharing any major updates about Lemmy / the fediverse community

• If there is an important post that could benefit from reaching more people, then letting the OP know that they can post here as well

I just hope more come here. I miss the actual content. We do have similar communities, but there are less posts / comments.

Hi! !FloatingIsFun@fedia.io mod here. Thank you for the shout out! I’ll try to participate here from now on.

Sub.rehab can show you subreddits that have verified official communities on Lemmy, Mbin, and others. You can import your followed subreddits from Reddit and find their Fediverse counterparts quickly. It’s the best place I’ve found for Reddit users to find communities to follow here, even if a lot of them aren’t very active and their Reddit versions are still active too.

I think Lemmy and Mbin’s interfaces scare some people off. A lot of users don’t know that Lemmy has plenty of other third-party interfaces like Photon, Alexandrite, Voyager, and of course, Old.

Mbin lacks these for now, but makes up for it with the rarely-used custom CSS for magazines, just like Old Reddit, and custom JS too! I use mine to create a two-column layout with big thumbnails! Unfortunately, the CSS doesn’t federate and is only visible when viewing it on Fedia itself. I’d love to have even a Lemmy-like banner image on other instances.

For the daily word puzzle Wordle, !wordle@lemmy.world and /r/Wordle both benefit from having a bot post a discussion thread for each day’s puzzle as it’s released. I go there every day and post how I did on the day’s puzzle. I still post and moderate on the Reddit one every once in a while, but I tell them about the Lemmy one while I’m there. The recently-created !dailygames@lemmy.zip does this for several daily puzzle games, but I’m not sure if it’s a stronger community or just more cluttered.

Of course, we could remind Reddit users that the Fediverse doesn’t have ads! That was a huge selling point for me.

And when a Reddit community decides to go all-in and move here, they could consider a full screen redirect link like Old Reddit /r/Mei. I thought about using that redirect myself on my old subreddit.

deleted by creator

/r/Cleveland

And

/r/ClevelandGuardians

I miss my friends…

the only reason i visit reddit for nowdays are the fgc subs (stuff like r/StreetFighter & r/Fighters)

i also think gaming comunitys in general are a good fit, because they bridge the gap between IT nerds and a more casual userbase

!floatingisfun@fedia.io

Pinging @hitstun@fedia.io, really love your community by the way!