Whaf do you think of hosting an AMA with John Oliver to make Lemmy/kbin officially a viable Reddit replacement?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Bit of a longer TLDR including context, I'll call it a TLDDD (too long, didn't deep dive):
Doreen was a moderator of /r/antiwork, she went on Fox News to present the subreddit and why it was so interesting to so many. This wasn't agreed upon by the community or the other moderators.
Fox immediately tried to frame it as people just sucking off the teat of "corporate america" and not wanting to work. In reaction to this, Doreen failed to actually make any arguments that a Fox News viewer would understand and even played directly into the propagandist's hands by using out of context philosophies like "laziness is a virtue" and saying that she worked as a dog walker.
On top of this, Doreen was incredibly unpresentable in the video and looked like your average, basement-dwelling netizen, sitting in a dimly lit room with a 2010s webcam. For the right-wingers at fox, she was the perfect image of what they imagine leftists to be like:
Trans
Autistic
Socialist
Unkempt
No "real" job (dog walker)
Here's a screenshot from the interview to give you an idea of what I mean by unkempt and unpresentable
Bit of a longer TLDR including context, I'll call it a TLDDD (too long, didn't deep dive):
Doreen was a moderator of /r/antiwork, she went on Fox News to present the subreddit and why it was so interesting to so many. This wasn't agreed upon by the community or the other moderators.
Fox immediately tried to frame it as people just sucking off the teat of "corporate america" and not wanting to work. In reaction to this, Doreen failed to actually make any arguments that a Fox News viewer would understand and even played directly into the propagandist's hands by using out of context philosophies like "laziness is a virtue" and saying that she worked as a dog walker.
On top of this, Doreen was incredibly unpresentable in the video and looked like your average, basement-dwelling netizen, sitting in a dimly lit room with a 2010s webcam. For the right-wingers at fox, she was the perfect image of what they imagine leftists to be like:
Trans
Autistic
Socialist
Unkempt
No "real" job (dog walker)
Here's a screenshot from the interview to give you an idea of what I mean by unkempt and unpresentable
Not even walker. They just had to mind the dogs, but they got fired from that job because they were sleeping on the job, then were bewildered that they got fired.
I deleted the other comment first, when I realized I didn't reply to the comment asking for more info, and then posted this. Perhaps something fucky with how lemmy served the page to you or deleted the post?
Oh shit, my bad. I'm almost certain it's because we are on lemmy.ml, this server has been having issues. Sometimes my comments don't show up for hours.
Your other comment still appears for me now, undeleted with 3 upvotes. But if I go to feddit.de I can see it's been deleted.
I should have just let you handle it, woops.
I wonder if you can see my other comment on this thread where I uploaded the video itself? Maybe that hasn't loaded for everyone yet, although it was posted over an hour ago
Think I'd have to agree with that, I don't think it's ready for an "event" at this point. It will be at some point, but not yet. Still something to think about.
I love Lemmy, but I feel like people are overestimating the ability of the platform. Stability and usability issues aside, there's the question of why would John Oliver come here? We don't have any history of celebrity AMAs, and highest estimates of our userbase puts us at maybe 1% of reddit, or 1 million users. For comparison's sake Ashens has 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube, do you think he could suddenly decide to do interviews and have the pull to get someone like John Oliver?
I think reaching out to Christian Selig or Louis Rossmann as other commenters suggested is more realistic, and would probably be a better experience for everyone involved.
I've never administrated a Lemmy instance, but I can't shake the feeling that the traffic and activity that would generate would be a massive blow to the infrastructure we have right now. I can't name anybody at the moment, but maybe we should start with someone a bit smaller?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It would be great if Victoria from Reddit would do it. Even Reddit can't do proper AMAs without her.
It's a pretty important task to verify that the AMAee is who they claim to be and to ensure that the technical things work.
There's no way that someone famous would bother making an account on Lemmy by themselves just for this unless they already understand what it is in the first place.
It basically requires a host to conduct it like a regular interview.
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.
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.
The John Oliver stuff is happening on Reddit, though. That's where the attention is, that's where his face is being plastered everywhere. It really has nothing to do with anything here.
It's all people who don't want to bebherr, sending the message that they don't want over there to change.
Plus he's probably heard of Reddit, but not Lemmy, kbin, or the Fediverse. And he has no dog in
I said this in another comment, but this AMA should not be about reddit at all. In fact, we only bring up reddit to the effect of asking how he felt about his pictures. If we make this a regular AMA about his regular life, it would show lemmy to be a viable alternative to reddit. He doesn't know anything about lemmy other than that it's an alternative to reddit where people control the platform.
Doubt nobody will ask his opinions about Reddit though.
Don't get me wrong, he's a great guest, but he's a bit too big for Lemmy right now. He has probably a very busy schedule, and can't take a couple hours off just to chat with a dozen people.
A single tweet from him will take far less time and get 100x more views.
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.
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.
Two have been set up on Kbin: (including links for both lemmy and kbin users until the kbin bugs get fixed) !IAmA (kbin link) !askmeanything (kbin link)
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