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.
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.