this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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Are you familiar with the history of how Brazil got rid of hyperinflation in the 90's by creating an imaginary currency tied to the Dollar?
Think of the ghost accounts as the intemediate step. They are meant to work for people that are signing up and encounter some content. Without them, people would join the communities and not find anything to browse, so they bounce anyway.
Not sure I follow how an unclaimed ghost account solves this problem vs. that unclaimed account being marked as a bot
Imagine you are big on some niche community which exists on Reddit (let's say, e.g, /r/civ)
You want to leave Reddit, you hear about Lemmy.
You sign up.
You go to browse.feddit.de and look for Civilization communities.
You find !civ@lemmy.ca and !civ@lemm.ee, both of which with no activity in the last 3 months, and most posts are more about people trying to figure out what to talk about instead of actually talking about the thing that the community is supposed to be about. Not only this is confusing (do you need to have any relationship to either lemmy.ca and lemm.ee to join? Why are there two separate communities? If these communities are dead, should I create yet-another one?) but don't you think that the most common reaction would be simply to drop the whole effort and just go back to browsing Reddit?
Now, contrast this with the scenario where fediverser.network has compiled a comprehensive map of all these niche subreddits and can point to at least one lemmy community, and also where the mirroring is using these bots to post relevant content to all of these communities.
Now you can sign up to any instance, and you check what would be the recommended community to replace your favorite subs. You go and !civ@level-up.zone (yeah, I just created it). If the alien.top bots were running, the community would already have at least the 14 posts that were created on Reddit today and made to their front page.
And if you decide to join Lemmy by using alien.top itself, all of that could be made automatically. If you had 50 subreddits, you would be automatically subscribed to all the relevant 50 Lemmy communities, you wouldn't even need to worry about having to figure out which-subreddits-map-to-which-lemmy-communities and your feed would be customized.
I don't know about you, but to me the second case seems like a much better onboarding experience and I'd be a lot more likely to stick around if that was a reality.
If the posts are from a Reddit community's few actual posters and none from any of the posters on Lemmy instances, what's the incentive to switch over to Lemmy? Moreover, if someone's mainly a poster, aren't you only encouraging them to stay on Reddit and post as they know there's someone handling mirroring their posts elsewhere for them?
I've read over the discussions around this and I can sort of see where you're coming from for some of the few folks that want to lurk and browse Reddit stuff via Lemmy apps or the like, but I'm struggling to see how much it really helps different Lemmy instances draw more posters. This may help bring lurkers over, but from what I can tell, there's not much of a problem with people lurking across Lemmy, but more of a poster problem, in terms of having a greater variety of people posting and commenting.
The whole premise is that there is a significant part of Reddit's userbase that don't want to be "on" Reddit, yet they can't find their niche communities elsewhere.
Having a way to bridge the content away from Reddit is (or should be) the incentive for them.
By bringing lurkers, you are solving one side of the "chicken-and-egg" problem.
Like I said in other comments: I had ~50 subreddits I was subscribed to, but I was an active participant on maybe 4 of them. Thanks to the mirrors, I could drop all of my Reddit usage and have access to all the content directly from Lemmy.
As an user, my remaining problem is that these 4 subreddits where I was still participating don't have as many "real people", and then there are two ways to solve this:
The former is being worked on, but as many others already chimed in, it puts the project at the mercy of Reddit. This system is a clear a violation of their TOS and they could outright break it.
The latter is a lot harder to do and it basically requires a coordinated effort of as many people in a pool of ~30k people to act as evangelists to reach out to a group of mostly ADHD-riddled and tech-unsavvy users.