Can we organize AMAs to help Lemmy/Kbin grow?

Wander@yiffit.net to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 89 points –

Anyone well known who wants to speak out about what's been happening on reddit? Louis Rossmann? Apollo dev? John Oliver (one can dream)... or maybe former Reddit mods who were kicked out?

Anyone who has a story and who understands they'd have a massive impact by giving an exclusive AMA on a Lemmy or Kbin instance.

This could be announced a few days in advance to make sure all remote instances follow the AMA community.

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Yes. For the love of god, yes. Even if it's for simple questions like "how do fediverse accounts work", it would be a major help for anyone switching over from reddit to lemmy or from Twitter to mastodon.

It would be fitting to have a John Oliver AMA to kick things off

Oh that would be amazing again though the infrastructure would have to be able to cope. Probably would need to be hosted on the most stable instance and close signups while it was on, and absolutely coordinate orher instances so they could be prepared.

Why would famous people want to do an AMA here, on Lemmy, of all places?

Anyways, "Barbie", only in theaters July 21st.

Quick someone call spez... Get him over here, we LOVE to hear him talk.

/s

Be honest, how many usernames are you parking across as many instances as possible? 😂

I'd love to find out that that's the real Margot Robbie hiding in plain sight.

That would be pretty clever, right?

I have seen you post before and had the same thought that it might actually be you, as in Margot Robbie. If I were to become famous, I'd still post things online.

If it is really you, maybe you can answer a few questions about movie production. Do you think the easy access to information now that everyone uses the internet influence how scenes are written? For example, scenes with a character getting hit in the head, knocked out, and being fine. I still see lots of unrealistic stuff like that.

It's really about the suspension of disbelief, correct?

Realism should not get in the way of making a good movie, of course a crazy ex-psychiatrist in clown makeup killing people with baseball bats also would not exist in real life, but that's acting. What's more important is the rules of the fictional universe are internally consistent to prevent that loss of suspension of disbelief.

And so, like in the movies, in a place where you can be anyone, I am whoever you want me to be.

It's really up to you.

What's more important is the rules of the fictional universe are internally consistent to prevent that loss of suspension of disbelief.

Good point. I like to completely escape, be presented with interesting points of view, or be entertained, so I tend to enjoy sci-fi/fantasy, comedy or drama.

And so, like in the movies, in a place where you can be anyone, I am whoever you want me to be.

In this context, it doesn't really matter to me if you are the person in the Barbie movie and or an awkward 14 year old that idolizes her/you, but it raises a good point. Before any kind of mass media, Cicero wrote about the power of eloquence and the importance of the wisdom to use it responsibly. That is more true today that 2000 years ago. Social Media gives the most persuasive people an earth sized megaphone. ANYBODY, with sufficient skill can post something that goes viral and have it reach millions over night and influence them including billionaires and politicians.

The aforementioned power gives platforms (and moderators) a lot of power because they control what people see. I'm really hoping for the Fediverse to succeed because I hope to distribute that power across borders and instances. There is still the age old problem of who should be in charge of the various communities. We have seen what can go wrong with Reddit where the community creator has it.

I'm actually amazed this account wasn't made just for this comment lol

I’d prefer IamA’s, instead of AMA’s. Stuff like I am a Ukrainian freedom fighter, I am lawyer that represented a serial killer, I am terminally ill. I wanna know what the people are doing, not what the celebs are doing.

Personally I’m not very interesting, but I know some of yous are. Let’s all chat!

I like this. It's be cool if a lot of the community came together to be interested in and ask questions about what a regular somebody does and thinks and feels in their normal day. A mom. A bank teller. A local radio producer. I'd get into that.

Hard agree, a well moderated interview can be interesting regardless of who the interview is. We all lead our own complex lives.

Without a doubt I miss the more normal IAMA's also.

One of the most successful IAMA's of all time was the vacuum repair guy and he absolutely was fascinating.

I miss those days of early AMA's before they turned into celebrity worship. There were some interesting and some really fucked up reads in there.

As a mid term objective I see it. There's still a lot to do before we could have a big AMA.

Why? No reason we couldn't keep doing amas. What would prevent it from being productive right now?

Layout is still being tweaked and you want the UI to be as easy to manage as possible for people doing the AMA (new reddit is likely a factor in more recent AMAs not being as good)

It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation regarding amount of people. More people will bring in more AMAs because it is largely a publicity thing. A low userbase means people may not want to do an AMA, or choose to do an AMA on a larger platform. But having AMAs brings people in. It's hard to get the ball rolling.

Maybe we can ask Spez to do an AMA on Lemmy?

We need to get at least v18 out. There are lots of performance improvements in there that will help with a large influx in load.

Maybe we can get @ruud@lemmy.world, @dessalines@lemmy.ml , or @nutomic@lemmy.ml to do one?

I wouldn't be opposed, if people wanted to pick a date in advance. We don't have much time, but it'd probably be beneficial.

That would be cool. I would join, but I only know Lemmy for 3 weeks :-)

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Awesome, thank you for taking the time to respond and being open to the idea! I've really appreciated the tools you've made allowing these communities to form and I hope you are keeping your sanity with all the reddit migration explosions!

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I don't think they'd bring anyone from outside Lemmy.

Ruud would likely bring in some Masto + other fediverse users who haven't tried Lemmy yet.

Allowing the core devs to let us know more about them outside of their coding + assumed politics (we really should have a link to their recent post https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_after_the_Reddit_blackout and make it a rule in the AMA to not beat that dead horse) would likely make lemmy more approachable to those on the borderline. Any way it would go would still be better than u/spez's.

I think any of the three would be large enough that we can stress test community interest/behavior, mod abilities, and instance/community load.

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This is far too premature.

AMA is a high amount of trust in the moderation team. You build trust by having assurances that the AMA hosts have done their research and prove that the person is who they say they are.

Where we need to start is: who around here is even capable of hosting AMAs? Are they willing to host AMAs to build a community/subreddit's trust? Etc. etc.

Build trust by having AMAs of interesting non-celebrity people.

Yeah I think there's a lot of value in hearing from non-celebrities and to be honest, people being here because they want to be rather than they're promoting something is just more interesting.

I'd totally love that! Hearing the personal experiences of "Normal" (for lack of a better word) people would be awesome! The vast differences in the lives that people lead is fascinating

Unfortunately one of the easiest and most effective ways in the past was to have someone post a dated "Hi reddit" pic from their official verified Twitter account. Well, so much for that.

Meh, there are enough places for the celebrities to interact with the peasants, why does it have to happen here too. Peasants together strong.

you shouldn't be down voted. it really is the peasants that make these places great. i would suggest, however, that tech less-literate peasants are often kept away until something from normie-world draws them in and they realize it isn't so hard to pick up. AMAs sometimes bring people in that might not have made the leap in otherwise.

This is a great idea, but who would organize and run the AMA?

Obviously - we get u/chooter from Reddit to join the Federation and do it. Beloved by all, rivaled by none.

AMAs can be posted to a different instance each round based in a lottery system. That way, nobody gets all the traffic with each celebrity.

However, I would start with Lemmy.ml or Kbin.social since those are flagships.

Me obviously, I’m bipolar so we have to schedule amas when I’m feeling manic.

If I understood your joke correctly, then you may be confusing "bipolar" with "multiple personality disorder". They are entirely separate things.

Anyone know how to get a hold of Victoria Taylor? She was the original AMA organizer of Reddit before they let her go.

She has a LinkedIn and last posted an article in May 2023. Her reddit profile u/chooter commented 53 days ago. Maybe one of those?

Was her role paid? Or was she a volunteer? Because if it’s the latter I hope that she’s learned that if you’re good at something don’t do it for free tbh

She may be willing to do it pro bono once or twice just to stick it to Reddit one last time

It's a good idea.

Do we have a more active AMA community? All I can find is this:

https://lemmy.world/c/ama

Of course, for people like mods and developers, you could quite easily reach out directly. The Apollo dev is on Mastodon, the Reddit mods probably responds to reddit DMs.

As for actual celebrities, you'd have to get their attention somehow. They have publicists whose job it is is to filter out the people who want to talk to them.

I think it would be best to hold off until the Lemmy developers push out an update which solves the issue of having separate communities for the same topic on multiple instances. For example, multi-community feeds or merging instances.

Is this now widely acknowledged as a problem? I don't see a problem with that kind of fragmentation tbh. Especially since there was fragmentation of that kind in reddit too Maybe Lemmy/kbin just need a reliable way to search across instances.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I definitely don't think it's a problem. If we start merging similar communities and centralising everything... Doesn't that just end up defeating the whole point of the fediverse and recreating Reddit instead?

If I understand correctly, the issue is /c/sysadmin is different from /m/sysadmin (just example subs), creating overlap communities for the same thing. So if someone's doing an AMA they might be using /c/AMA, but other users would be trying to find it in /m/AMA and not understand why it's missing.

My opinion is, if we want Lemmy to take off and be a replacement for Reddit, it needs to be user friendly for the non-tech savvy users as well without having to explain how it works in a 3 page essay. Consolidating those communities across instances would help with that a lot.

I get that, and it does totally make sense -- the main issue I have is viewing this as a strict "replacement" for Reddit. I believe we should be more comfortable with moving and "replacing" Reddit with something more like an alternative than a direct copy; Reddit fell apart for a lot of reasons, but we can at least point at one thing to change; centralisation.

I think we shouldn't replace like for like, but move on and find new things; whether that's Lemmy, or other alternatives. Some people prefer centralised forums, some people prefer more niche communities -- for me, personally, I like more niche communities -- but I think there's a way for us all to be happy without sacrificing the fediverse ideals.

This is pretty brilliant. Only problem would be I guess people would want a large audience, but hey, gotta get the ball rolling somehow.

Sure. Email the celebrity/interesting person you're closest to and make it happen.

Word of mouth marketing is the best strategy right now. Look how lemmy user base spiked in recent days. More people will look for alternatives after 3rd party apps stops working on July 1st. In the meantime, spread the word on reddit.

AMA with Paul Ruud and his new book "Look Out For The Little Guy" as he struggles to build a competitor against the giant that is Reddit.

I'm a boring, middle-age white guy, who has generic likes and dislikes, AMA.