The problem with that plan is that a huge amount of the value of Reddit was that it was well-indexed by search engines so that when you went searching for something, the conversations from Reddit would pop up, which were generally quite high-quality as far as forum-type content goes.
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.
Migrating communities from one platform to another is a lot more complicated than most people assume.
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.
Isn’t there a 2TB dump of Reddit posts and comments as of February 2023? Couldn’t you that instead of the API to seed your site’s content as a workaround to the TOS?
> 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.
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.
well, what good is it when google indexes ANYTHING? even cohost appears high in results nowadays... and dont get me started about how google includes also crap generated by llms... google is on its course of devalueing itself.
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'm sure with enough community-support someone will write a plugin or tool to expose Lemmy content to http pages that can be indexed? I haven't used Lemmy before, but if I was making a Reddit-like clone, that sort of thing would have been baked in from the start.
To my knowledge, Lemmy instances can all be crawled by Google already. Using "site:lemmy.world" for example, returns indexed results. It's just that Google's algorithm has received billions of reddit searches for years, so they're biasing Reddit results. This will change organically.
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.