This episode had a very interesting conversation about how we talk about “social media” (yes, i’m still putting it in quotes and stubbornly insisting on my own personal terminology). It’s multi-user blogs. It’s all blogs.

But what really stood out to me was a bit about how Facebook usurped MySpace as The Platform Everyone Is Using. Facebook introduced a bot. You feed the bot your MySpace credentials, and it logs in, scrapes all your friends posts and messages, and presents them to you within Facebook. That’s how they encoraged people to move, using programming to eliminate the downside of migrating services. For Facebook users, they never lost the functionality that had been keeping them on MySpace, so migration was an easier choice to make.

Remember when everyone was really mad at :reddit-logo: for changing the mobile app? And it led to a minor bump in lemmy use, but largly people still stuck with :reddit-logo: cus it was were all the communities and posters were still established? Imagine if lemmy had something like Facebook’s MySpace scrapper – like, a bot you could put on your instance that scrapes the posts off of the reddit community you’re trying to migrate.

I’m not saying this would be useful or even wanted for hexbear. But it might have resulted in more of the smaller subreddits successfully porting over to a lemmy instance. Something to think about. Reddit is going to do something that pisses off users (and, more critically, moderators) again. It’s inevitable. Maybe lemmy should have the tools ready and waiting…