2y ago

Can we organize AMAs to help Lemmy/Kbin grow?

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.

87 comments

Why would famous people want to do an AMA here, on Lemmy, of all places?
Anyways, "Barbie", only in theaters July 21st.
- I'm actually amazed this account wasn't made just for this comment lol
- Quick someone call spez... Get him over here, we LOVE to hear him talk.
  /s
  
  He's all about his sense of pride and accomplishment
- 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.
  
  ...a Barbie-llion.
- Well, not necessarily ultra famous people, but anyone who has a story to share regarding the Reddit fiasco. For example third party app developer. Maybe the Sync developer who confirmed a Lemmy app is in the works
  
  I'm still not sure what my life is going to look like after /r/furry_irl is dead.

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.
  
  I know a guy who knows a guy who once met John Oliver at the airport. I'm going to see if I can get this going.

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.
  
  lemmy.world is the largest english instance currently. I'd say it's much more a flagship instance.
- Also who the hell would want to be interviewed by a bunch of Lemmings?
  
  Who wouldn't?!?
  
  lol idk why but that is hilarious
- Help us, u/chooter ...
- 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
- I think you'd do a great job!
- 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.

Fediverse developers may be a good start

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.

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.
- I didn't know there was a difference
- 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.

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
- o/
  /r/france mod. Not booted (yet).
  Not super available but I can help people show how we used to set it up in /r/france
  It is not rocket science: Anyone could start an AMA but mods would automatically sticky a message with the "proof status" of OP. Usually people asked the mods beforehands on how to check proof but not always
  The sticky would be saying "OP provided proof"/"OP did not provide proof, it may still be legit, but know we can't check if it is true".
  AMA
- What's really cool about the fediverse IMHO is that you can have multiple reputable media outfits run their own AMA communities... want to hear from a sports star maybe ESPN could host their own community, movie star then idk rotten tomatoes, scientist someone else, etc... the concept is really fascinating. Still not there yet though. The platform still needs to mature ( which is doing quickly) and the community needs to grow.
- 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.
- I think if they just write something on another social media like twitter, that would be enough proof and easily doable. E.g. John Oliver posted pictures for reddit days ago. I know getting him would be very… far fetched, but the general concept seems doable.

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.

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.

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.

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 :-)
  
  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!
- 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.

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

Something closer to the original community on Reddit would work very well...
It didn't just start out as "celebrities interacting with the peasants" as another commenter pointed out. It was really people (or sometimes jackasses pretending to be real people) answering questions about their life and experiences.

Some comprehensive FAQs would be useful.

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

Umm, wtf is "AMA"? I really did search the web, and discerning from context. It's really not obvious.
- AMA stands for Ask Me Anything
  
  Thanks! Sheesh, lol.
- Ask me anything, it's an open floor question and answer session where you can post your questions and have them answered by someone neat

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.

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.

Is there community just for AMA I run community for request figures we could get together.

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

Maybe we can get Woody Harrelson, he can talk about Rampart.
- Or we could invite Spez to throw out some more false accusations about the Apollo dev blackmailing him.

This needs to happen!

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?

I think Rossman is team reddit
- Ha...ha no he is not team reddit my friend
- Not at all. Have you seen his latest videos? He said he wouldn't post post there anymore

87 comments