Actually, subreddits being mapped as lemmy instances makes more sense to me than the "single identity" of reddit.
If you move everything to Lemmy, that won't happen much and as a result fewer people will join the community that don't already know about it somehow.
the human internet is probably doomed. long live the llm generated internet
oh which gives me an idea: fake users as a service: using llm to generate comments for reddit after the dark
I cannot imagine, that this is not already being offered/in use.
Cold start problem: initially the new community has no content archive and only a few users, most people are lazy, it takes time to relearn the ui and set up subscriptions(there is no good way to export/import subscriptions and saved posts)
Transfer of moderation: some people are going to take the opportunity to seize ownership of the new community, and the community will split up
Discoverability: reddit gets a lot of user traffic from google since google search quality has gone down and people add site:reddit.com to their search
We need a new form of social media where users and communities can easily export their content and data. A reddit clone with a similar UI is not enough.
Why not a reddit clone with the API data and some sort of claim for accounts via proof of ownership? Just make them comment a special string on reddit to claim your account on the new clone. Clone content and subreddits of the last X days. Shouldn't be toooo hard. Maybe use the reddit links for images and video for the first POC until you can serve them yourself.
Moderators could claim their subreddits, people dont lose too much - maybe also migrate your subreddit subscriptions.
Sounds like a 1 month job for a good team.
If a site allowed imports how would it work? It could work for all of a user's top level tweets, but for something with threads like reddit I don't see any solution.
Lemmys far too immature to take over Reddits position. Even with 24/7 development (Which isnt happening) its not going to get to a strong enough position to take over for a long time.
It'd have been like Mastodon trying to step in to take over Twitter in 2017.
I also don't think Lemmy is too far from the prime time. Based on my usage over the last week, its perfectly usable and I think it needs two things for it to get to the point where I could just tell a non-technical friend to join without a long explanation of things they need to know:
* A better approach and advice for which instance to register on. https://join-lemmy.org/ is OK but isn't the ideal landing page for someone who isn't a SW engineer * Better handling of links to posts/communities on other instances, so that you end up on the view from your instance and you can more easily upvote, reply etc. There's a few options here, but one would be to fully adopt the !community@instance notation, rewrite links in posts into that form, and when displaying posts generate the link to your instance.
There's also the more general federation problem (that Mastodon also has) of finding something via Google or similar, and then if you want to follow you have to go back and search in your own instance. Browser extensions can solve this, but I don't know if that is sufficient.
The other Reddit is one of small niche communities with hundreds or thousands of subscribers, but where a lot of experts of that niche hang out and comment. Pretty much like old web forums. Lemmy looks (I have only joined yesterday) good enough to serve that type of Reddit. And I think at least tech niche subreddits are somewhat inclined to jump ship, since they are more principled about third-party client, etc.
It's similar to Mastodon and Twitter. Twitter hasn't collapsed (yet) and Mastodon hasn't taken over its role. However, many tech folks have jumped ship. My Twitter feed (especially with recommendations) is now mostly tech bros and influencers with hot takes on LLMs. My Mastodon feed is mostly high-quality, insightful tech posts. And in contrast to before Elon took over Twitter, it's not a ghost town anymore.