He would be the perfect person to AMA as he’s already associated with Reddit revolts, and it would result in tremendous media coverage and mark fediverse as a viable alternative to Reddit. What do you think?
I like the idea but we are not ready at all for something like that. It’d be crazy to blow our load too early and draw a bunch of media attention here only for people to come here and find it unusable. If redditors are struggling this much to migrate, the general public has no chance.
See where we are at in 3-6 months and reassess.
I can remember all too well how it went for the r/antiwork mod who was interviewed by Fox. Anything Lemmy does needs to be very deliberately planned by people who know what to say and not to say.
I agree, I think following this initial burst of users and our feedback we’ll get there with time.
I agree, but it doesn’t hurt to think this out for when the time comes.
He absolutely would be a great pick. And I suspect he would be interested. What I wonder is: how much would it grow Lemmy and the Fediverse? Impossible to tell, but even if it’s only a small gain, I think it would be worth trying.
I think it would be a definite boost to the fediverse, because a major talking point I see in reddit discussions is that there is no viable alternative to reddit, so people are going to stay no matter what. This event would put a big spotlight on lemmy, and if it goes well, will result in a lot of regular users from reddit.
Reddit has long been known for its userbase being capable of surprisingly big things. Getting John Oliver to AMA here might show that Lemmy is capable of the same thing.
Celebrity worship was how we got to modern corporate reddit in the first place. I’d like to keep it away for a while longer.
Go preorder tickets for “Barbie”.
Could we maybe get Cory Doctorow (and is he worth getting, I don’t actually know much about him as a person?), in all of this I saw his essay on TikTok’s enshitification getting passed around quite a bit, also he actually knows what the fediverse is.
I don’t know much about him myself, but he was recently on Adam Conover’s podcast and he was super well spoken.
That essay was honestly a work of art, and I have a feeling it’s going to remain relevant for a while. I’d love to probe Cory for additional perspectives.
I support this. How do we make it happen?
I think you should probably ask him first
Actually we should talk here first before asking him, because if he agrees but nobody wants to participate that would be a very bad look.
I am all on board with the idea. If someone has connections to mods from r/IAmA please reach out to them for help and let’s make it happen (here on lemmy / kbin)
In the mean time comment and upvote this post to spread the word.
Other thought: I think in recent years, AMAs have been trending towards decentralization towards the individual subreddit level anyways, because neat people want to interact with groups that would be interested in what they are saying, otherwise they are going to get drowned out by the noise in something big like r/iama.
Which means that the only people who are going to do an AMA on a big, general subreddits are mostly people who have a lot of money and influence to sell things to the biggest audience, like to promote a major blockbuster, for example.
So, if we have a big Last Week Tonight fan community on Lemmy, yeah, let’s welcome John Oliver there, but he’s not going to come to help ex-redditors spite promote Lemmy, what’s in it for him?
Since decentralization is the way forward for the Fediverse, AMAs should be decentralized toward the community level anyways, and maybe with a dedicated community to aggregate them across the Fediverse, having a centralized instance solely for AMAs is what led reddit down its current path.
I mean, being a death nail on a corporation’s IPO for spite and content is on brand for him
Yeah, but why would he want to jump straight into the mess instead of watching from the sidelines and write jokes about it?
Can you imagine the questions that’s going to be asked on Lemmy if he actually does do an AMA?
- “Uh, what do you think about reddit closing its API access so there’s no third party apps any more”
- “How do you feel that reddit userbase is spamming with your pictures instead posting normal content?”
- “Horse sized duck or duck sized horse?”
- “Upboat to fuck spez am I right?”
- “More sexy pictures pls.”
See?
Okay, this brings up a question that’s been in the back of my mind. I’m all in on federated communities, but I’m wondering how that architecture supports a massive event. Are there any instances that could support a giant number of concurrent users constantly refreshing a page? How much of the server burden is on the insurance hosting the community, and how much is on the instance that a visiting user is logged into? I’m not sure how it works.
Not just the architecture, but also the possible logistics of such an event. Who’d contact John Oliver’s PR team, for example. What about the scheduling? Also, while I think people here are good-natured enough that it might not be necessary, who’d be making sure that the thread responses (the questions) don’t violate any community and instance rules?
I may be overthinking it, but such a huge event would involve a lot of coordination from many different people.
That’s a good point. I would think at least Lemmy.world would handle such a load.
Beehaw is also quite well funded atm. Iirc their balance is currently several times their server cost
We’ve got competence over here on sh.itjust.works, the guy running the instance apparently does something similar for his day job.
But these three are all terrible suggestions because of the situation of Beehaw defederating from the other two. If you pick one, some of the Lemmings (lol) on another instance won’t be able to interact.
Beehaw has defederated, though, so no one would be able to see that.
The current federation is not built to support a massive number of users all on the same page.
I am hoping for a solution that involves major servers working together to direct a stream of donations into a group project, a super server designed to meet the need during heavy load events.
It’d probably have to be heavily moderated with minimal local activity. The point would be that when major news dropped, the users of different instances would be able to come to a central forum (the superserver) to discuss with the world, and also to any local or subscribed forums to discuss with their people.
Benefitting all of the admins who no longer have to worry about their server crashing, and all the users who can either avoid the superserver or participate in the larger discussion without any impact to their local Lemmy experience.
I’ve been here about a week or so and so far I think the absolutely perfect candidate would be Vermin Supreme.
To be honest I don’t think we are ready for that level of scrutiny. I would imagine if he were to agree, he would do research first, and the Fediverse has a lot of unanswered questions for the mainstream person.
Can the Fediverse sustain users, both in usability and costs (see also “Can we keep up with user growth”)? How will NFSW moderation work, since so far I see most instances saying it won’t and just shutting down that vector of work and questions? How does regulation or working with authorities look like on the Fediverse (this is antithetical to most Fediverse goals, but for main stream people a normal question)? How will user verification work for celebrities or important figures? What are the ethical consideration to support devs, like the lemmy devs, with controversial opinions?
Some of these are whataboutism when comparing to Reddit. Some of these just stuff the average Redditor and Fediverse user couldn’t care less about, or frankly don’t want asked, but these are top questions I would expect a liberal journalist to be asking, even if they are generally anti-corperate and pro-grassroots.
Those are some good points
Is there a dedicated AMA community on Lemmy, Beehaw or Kbin?
/r/AMA good on reddit as it centralized a lot of those kinds of posts. Having an equivalent here on the threadiverse would be fantastic to enable these kinds of events.
There is already an AMA community the first step would be to help that community grow in order to get enough participants to make it a good experience for everyone.
Why would he give up the free advertising?
Let’s do it.
