This question may be moot but it’s something I’ve been thinking about. I’ve only recently jumped into this brave new world so you’ll have to forgive my ignorance.
I’m wondering if there’s any etiquette or conventions for which instance a ‘migrated’ subreddit should be hosted on. More specifically, I’m thinking about the communities where the subject matter is more regional.
For example, if I use an account on a UK-based instance because that’s local to me then it might not be optimal to create a community on the UK instance if the subject matter is US-centric. Would that ultimately lead to a worse experience for the majority of those community members that are based in North America?
The difference in speed for me connecting to something in the UK vs the US is basically negligible, but it’s non-zero and potentially exacerbated for those that have slower or unstable internet connections. This may be particularly true while rapidly-expanding instances are a bit unstable anyway.
It’s obviously up to the mods of each subreddit to decide what to do for their “official” migration. However, what I’m afraid of happening is:
- A migrated subreddit is hosted on an instance which has a detrimental effect on the experience of a significant number of its users.
- To combat this, former Reddit communities get splintered into multiple, region-based communities.
The latter wouldn’t be so bad but one of the things that made Reddit so appealing to me was the differences in perspective from all walks of life that sparked discussion. That sense of being part of a diverse, active community might be lost if the overall Reddit migration is handled in a haphazardly way.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Am I worrying about a non-issue?
Is it time to crack each other’s heads open and feast on the goo inside?
So I’m on the /r/Disneyland mod team and we decided to move here to @Disneyland / [email protected] during the blackout. We’re still directing users here in the subreddit’s sidebar, although the mod team collectively decided to reopen the sub on Reddit after the admins started threatening mods directly.
There were a couple options floated when we were considering the move:
Make our own instance. Traditional forums like MiceChat have survived for decades; we’d effectively be a fediverse version of MiceChat. The main subject would be Disney, but we’d have Disneyland communities, WDW communities, Marvel communities, Star Wars communities, etc. This was shot down because we didn’t have the funding, time, manpower, or legal expertise to host things ourselves at any kind of scale. All us mods have day jobs and we don’t want to take on a full-time admin role; other Disney subs likewise didn’t seem terribly excited about joining in. Shout-out to /r/startrek for starting https://startrek.website and /r/Android for https://lemdro.id/, but it wasn’t in the cards for us.
Join a Lemmy server. This was before Lemmy.world existed, so our options were limited. We basically had Lemmy.ml, Beehaw.org, or sh.itjust.works. We disagree with the admins of Lemmy.ml on a fundamental level; Beehaw doesn’t allow new communities; sh.itjust.works was maybe doable but we didn’t want to deal with that URL for a Disney-themed community. Waiting for a new general-purpose instance to appear (what Lemmy.world became) just wasn’t in the cards since I wanted it to be open during the blackout.
Join kbin.social. At the time, there were no other Kbin instances - fedia.io didn’t exist yet. But Kbin seemed very flexible (direct Mastodon integration is a plus!), the admin team was just Ernest (but he had a good head on his shoulders), it was my personal fediverse site of choice, and it was growing quickly. At the time we made the call, federation didn’t work as expected but it was promised to be fixed (and it has been; we now federate rather broadly).
We’ve gotten some organic activity on the Disneyland magazine over here on Kbin, which is nice because it shows we don’t need to keep the community on life support. The big downside to Kbin (and Lemmy!) is that mod tools basically don’t exist; it’s going to be tricky without AutoMod long-term. Once Kbin has an API it should be trivial to remake AutoMod for Kbin though, assuming the API has moderation actions.