I realized now just how much I sounded like some kind of Lemmy early adopter supremacist in this thread, for that I apologize. I didn’t mean to be a dick.

God I love this about the Fediverse lol. On Twitter or Reddit you don’t get actual human interactions like this.

EDIT: Also important to note, I feel like this is gonna be a slow, slow process. We really have no idea when sign-ups will settle and could be looking at months or days of Reddit hemorrhaging users.

THIS THIS THIS. A lot of folks call the migration to Mastodon from Twitter a ‘failure’ because Mastodon didn’t immediately jump to 100 million monthly active users lol. There was a spike, but a lot of folks went back to Twitter. But we now see more spikes every week or so when some stupid shit happens on Twitter, and with every spike, more and more people stick around. We get about 2000 new users an hour on Mastodon across all servers. Now at 12 million MAUs, up from wayyyyyy less than that earlier last year. Growing slowly is the key, a migration won’t be instant.

Really begging folks not to take this kind of approach to having this conversation on Lemmy. We had literally this exact kind of discourse on Mastodon and it has severely impacted the public perception of Mastodon, to the point where there are tons of people that think it’s full of ‘NIMBYs’ who are super strict and expect you to behave a certain way.

People have a very very hard time understanding that software like Lemmy or Mastodon isn’t a community or a platform, but a network of individual communities that everyone has a different view into. A lot of my friends were burned joining Mastodon because they interacted with a bunch of boring white people who weren’t funny, and it’s hard for me to explain to them that you need to join a different instance and follow different people lol. Also people don’t understand instances or the fact that instances are run by volunteers.

When I started my Mastodon server (right before the big Twitter ‘migration’ lol) I loved what I found on Mastodon. The community was amazing. But this exact specific reaction (down to the stuff about refugees) ended up poisoning that community and the folks who potentially wanted to join it.

I’m still new to Lemmy, but I think it’s important to approach this with an open mind. Communities grow and change over time, and I think we should be more open to that and lead with empathy. And I understand the frustration with this is VERY real (trust me as an admin I MORE than get it). But I think a lot of what we’re getting from Reddit is very positive, not the negatives, due to the fact that we have more moderation control here and because it’s mostly the cooler users lol.> Yeah we already went through this exact thing with Masto and Twitter. The complaining about defed is particularly annoying to me, like… defederation is a feature of the fediverse, not a bug, lol… Hopefully the “this doesn’t work exactly like MyFavoriteSite” folks will clear out eventually like the last wave.

Also to be fair I don’t think that that means this becomes a neoliberal shithole, but I think the majority of folks joining mean well and like the vibe. They’re joining because of the vibe.