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?
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.
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'd be more inclined to reach out to Louis Rossmann, especially since he's said he won't post on reddit anymore. Maybe we can even find a home on lemmy for his right to repair campaign.
Let's start small. Can we do a Christian Selig AMA first? I think that would be a decent flagship that might draw the attention of the press. That way we have something proven before we start getting in people who have PR teams...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's worth a shot. If they decide to do something with it, you can guarantee it'll be a fair, impartial, and brutal look at the facts. And that it'll be fucking entertaining!
I think it would be awesome, but - my understanding is that AMA events tend to require quite a bit of moderation. Do we have good enough moderation on either platform yet - to be able to cope with an event like this?
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.
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 be here, 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
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.
John Oliver hosts a political talkshow. that's fine if you're showing off a specific Lemmy instance or community, but if your goal is to show off Lemmy as a platform, doing so with that topic is a recipe for disaster.
@nieceandtows I honestly think this would be doable and maybe worth perusing. I wonder who has the most contacts with Hollywood to make something like this happen