Building online communities takes time. Migrating from one site to another takes a little less time but it’s still a long-term thing.
It’s not so different from moving a retail location. Your store is moving from address A to address B down the road. You put up a sign at the old storefront telling customers, “it’s just down the road!” with instructions to get there and yet businesses that do this see massive sales drops. It’s not uncommon to lose half or three quarters of your customer traffic in the first three months after changing locations. It usually takes a year or more to stabilize to a new normal.
I see no reason why the migration of communities from Reddit to the Fediverse will be different since this type of migration is based on basic human behavior. We need to view it as a new location getting a great big lucky bonus surge because of people angry at our competitor and not some on/off switch.
The key is to maintain quality at the new location so the “customers” start to realize they’re getting a better experience here than they did over at Reddit.
Building online communities takes time. Migrating from one site to another takes a little less time but it’s still a long-term thing.
It’s not so different from moving a retail location. Your store is moving from address A to address B down the road. You put up a sign at the old storefront telling customers, “it’s just down the road!” with instructions to get there and yet businesses that do this see massive sales drops. It’s not uncommon to lose half or three quarters of your customer traffic in the first three months after changing locations. It usually takes a year or more to stabilize to a new normal.
I see no reason why the migration of communities from Reddit to the Fediverse will be different since this type of migration is based on basic human behavior. We need to view it as a new location getting a great big lucky bonus surge because of people angry at our competitor and not some on/off switch.
The key is to maintain quality at the new location so the “customers” start to realize they’re getting a better experience here than they did over at Reddit.