Though it’s been kind of peculiar seeing people discussing whether a subreddit is “officially” moving to some place other than Reddit, because aside from a few subreddits where there’s clear corporate backing there’s nothing “official” about any of them in the first place. The only people who claim to be making some kind of “official” decision are a couple of mods, and ironically Reddit’s fundamental position in this whole mess is that mods are easily replaceable.
The most official sense you get from the average community is that it is “this group of people” and if you convince enough of them to move, you’ve relocated ‘officially’ - in most settings, I don’t think that the mods have that sort of relationship with the community members, that they can just announce a move and the move has happened. Instead, you need to coax people to the other site and persuade them to migrate over, and if you manage to move enough of them over then the previous community has “officially” moved - even if their old location still exists and there are still people there and maybe even a community reforming without the previous group.
Community migration I think is something that needs to be done protracted and over time, rather than in one big collective leap.
I would dispute that “easily” part, especially for good mods, but it’s not like the creation of each domain-specific subreddit was some unique event that can never be replicated elsewhere.
In the fediverse, I think it really come down to which Named communities can grow the most in the near future; people go where other people are, so the easily accessible names and largest communities are going to see the easiest adoption by new users interested in that topic.
Agreed. The idea of migration propably has to emerge from the community itself. It is quite humane for mods to cling to their position and to impede dismantling of their communities. That being said there has been some brave harbingers among moderators.
I think that every comment and post here is a step forward. After all more content means more people, and more peolpe means more content.
I’m writing these comments from the perspective of a mod over there who is looking at trying to prompt community migration and who has a reasonable mandate from community voting around pursuing that - just that I’m super conscious at the same time that what they’re asking for requires me or the rest of the team accomplishing a bunch of things that we can’t directly influence.
I don’t think a lot of the votes we’re getting are also volunteers to come over here and be pioneers, they’re indicating that they support moving everyone over. They want the community and population from over there, but located somewhere else, and practically speaking we can’t make it happen that fast. They all have free will and it’ll take time for them to contribute it. They’re not driven to build a community or develop content - they want to join something already-existing and already meeting a need.
I think no matter where we end up, we’re still facing a tipping-point problem as far as getting that momentum happening - while I’m also needing to weigh responsibility to the people remaining behind, the people showing up late, and balance being a good steward to both of those responsibilities without sabotaging the new community. That’s further complicated by the fact that if we try to migrate and we “dismantle” our old community, Reddit just turns up, gives the subreddit to someone else, and the newcomers have every incentive to keep as many people on-platform as possible. In that specific case, everything gets worse, and community migration fails.
Equally, it’s something I think needs to be a “carrot” solution, not a “stick” - they need to want to move to a new location, and we have to offer them something that they want in that location, it’s neither appropriate nor productive to make the old community suck until they move to the new one. Doing that just winds up where they’re going to resent us and they’re going to actively seek out a community run by other people who haven’t, to their perception, “pushed” them out of the old space.
The most official sense you get from the average community is that it is “this group of people” and if you convince enough of them to move, you’ve relocated ‘officially’ - in most settings, I don’t think that the mods have that sort of relationship with the community members, that they can just announce a move and the move has happened. Instead, you need to coax people to the other site and persuade them to migrate over, and if you manage to move enough of them over then the previous community has “officially” moved - even if their old location still exists and there are still people there and maybe even a community reforming without the previous group.
Community migration I think is something that needs to be done protracted and over time, rather than in one big collective leap.
In the fediverse, I think it really come down to which Named communities can grow the most in the near future; people go where other people are, so the easily accessible names and largest communities are going to see the easiest adoption by new users interested in that topic.
Agreed. The idea of migration propably has to emerge from the community itself. It is quite humane for mods to cling to their position and to impede dismantling of their communities. That being said there has been some brave harbingers among moderators.
I think that every comment and post here is a step forward. After all more content means more people, and more peolpe means more content.
I’m writing these comments from the perspective of a mod over there who is looking at trying to prompt community migration and who has a reasonable mandate from community voting around pursuing that - just that I’m super conscious at the same time that what they’re asking for requires me or the rest of the team accomplishing a bunch of things that we can’t directly influence.
I don’t think a lot of the votes we’re getting are also volunteers to come over here and be pioneers, they’re indicating that they support moving everyone over. They want the community and population from over there, but located somewhere else, and practically speaking we can’t make it happen that fast. They all have free will and it’ll take time for them to contribute it. They’re not driven to build a community or develop content - they want to join something already-existing and already meeting a need.
I think no matter where we end up, we’re still facing a tipping-point problem as far as getting that momentum happening - while I’m also needing to weigh responsibility to the people remaining behind, the people showing up late, and balance being a good steward to both of those responsibilities without sabotaging the new community. That’s further complicated by the fact that if we try to migrate and we “dismantle” our old community, Reddit just turns up, gives the subreddit to someone else, and the newcomers have every incentive to keep as many people on-platform as possible. In that specific case, everything gets worse, and community migration fails.
Equally, it’s something I think needs to be a “carrot” solution, not a “stick” - they need to want to move to a new location, and we have to offer them something that they want in that location, it’s neither appropriate nor productive to make the old community suck until they move to the new one. Doing that just winds up where they’re going to resent us and they’re going to actively seek out a community run by other people who haven’t, to their perception, “pushed” them out of the old space.