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?

  • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • pingveno@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • SevFTW@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          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

          • pingveno@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            dog walker

            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.

          • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            Please delete this duplicate response, it’s very long and makes it harder to scroll the thread/see my comment. I don’t mean to be rude.

            • SevFTW@feddit.de
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              1 year ago

              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?

              • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                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

                • SevFTW@feddit.de
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                  1 year ago

                  Growing pains ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

                  All good! Yes, I can see your comment linking the video :)

        • Obi@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          TLDR: dog walker got walked all over on live TV, sub then pretty much died afaik.

          • SevFTW@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            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

    • SilentStorms@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • SgtThunderC_nt@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        It would be a 3 second blurb for him in actuality, the bigger story is the way users revolt in some instances but not others, see Tumblr banning porn vs the facebook analitica scandal. Both of those SHOULD have been enough for a mass exodus but for old people there was no other platform. It’s would have to be framed as an anti-trust kind of thing.

      • [C]hicken [G]od@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Makes more sense. Gotta mitigate the risk of ruining the UX of the site and the community. This is a good idea in general, though.

    • rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee
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      1 year 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.

  • whileloop@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • nieceandtows@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • whileloop@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • Wander@yiffit.net
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • nieceandtows@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      He’s a good candidate too, but to me, John Oliver has come to be associated with Reddit revolts in the media, because he was flooding the front page for a while. Even major news outlets wrote about it. If he does an ama here, it would symbolically show that those people have moved on to Lemmy.

  • nevernevermore@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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…

  • maximus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    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?

  • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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”.

  • AlligatorBlizzard@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Stovetop@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • eldoom@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I’ve been here about a week or so and so far I think the absolutely perfect candidate would be Vermin Supreme.

  • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • megane-kun@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • bstix@feddit.dk
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • AlligatorBlizzard@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          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.

    • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • fruitywelsh@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • nieceandtows@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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?

  • champion@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.