Let me explain where I am coming from. I'm working on an (open source, self-hosted) service to help people migrate from Reddit to Lemmy, called Fediverser [0]. It offers the following:
- A crowdsourced map of "reddit-to-lemmy" alternatives. - Use the list of subreddits and some preferences to find a Lemmy instance that is suitable for you.
- Lets people sign up to a "fediversed" Lemmy instance directly via Reddit OAuth. Simplifies the registration process, can let an admin skip the verification process (e.g, reject redditors whose account are less than 3 years old)
- Using the crowdsourced data, automatically subscribe the user to the communities that correspond to their favorite subreddits.
- If the admin of the Lemmy instance so chooses, it can also set up mirror bots, which will create "shadow accounts" for each reddit author. This shadow account can then be "taken over" by the real redditor if/when they sign up to the instance.
I believe that these features together would lead to a credible threat to Reddit's dominance. My remaining "problem" to solve is, simply put, that I need more people running this, because it's just too much data for a single node. I set up an instance that was mirroring ~100 reddits (posts and comments). In three months, my database was already recording ~3 million "shadow" users and ~10 million posts + submissions.
For this to work, I either need to have more instance admins willing to run the Fediverser software, or I need to move the "shadow" users and the mirrored content straight to the client and only bring to the Lemmy server the content from users who actually migrated.