First off, I understand that this isn’t our top priority right now, but I am scared that this can will be kicked far too down the road. I also don’t want to cause a storm of drama here, nor a split. No hard feelings here to Emperor, Tom or Albatross.
Preface
When we came up with the idea for our next Instance to replace feddit.uk, we settled on a name and bought a domain for it. That domain was quackhouse.uk . We decided it was a fun-loving name and carried numerous benefits: • .UK TLD. Which was very important. • Not tied to Reddit. • Easy to say and memorable • Not tied to Lemmy. • Not tied to the Fediverse.
We were quite excited for Quackhouse, and to have such a last minute development for Quackhouse was disappointing.
Why Quackhouse?
Why did we decide the last two weren’t a good idea? Well, to start, people who are interested in Lemmy and the Federation aspect would go for a lemmy instance anyway regardless of the name. I believe we aren’t that stupid as to say “oh, it has lemmy/federated in it, it must be good!”. HOWEVER just say you are trying to persuade your mate down the pub to join. He likes the idea of a forum for British-type subjects with no advertisements, tracking, and is voluntary donation-funded. However he isn’t tech savvy. It would still be perfectly reasonable to tell him “Hey! There’s a really nice community for discussing UK Related subjects! It’s called Quackhouse.uk! (Mention some forums etc), Want to join?” Therefore for all he knows is that he’s joined up to a site, there is content and discussion, he’s happy. He doesn’t know yet that there are users from other websites interacting with him, but he knows how to use it and he’s happy. He’ll probably figure out about it eventually but it won’t be off-putting.
This approach wouldn’t harm the “power-user” tech enthusiast, but it would be inviting to both and benefit growth.
Lemmy’s growth problem
People were saying during Reddit’s downfall to “join Lemmy” but I must be honest, even I resisted at first. The whole step of choosing an instance was REALLY off-putting. So I think an alternative approach would be to tell people about the instance instead of the fediverse in some cases.
The Feddit.UK problem
Has anyone here tried telling anyone who wasn’t in the know about Feddit.uk? If you don’t believe me, tell someone. Your response will most likely be: “Is that a Reddit knockoff?” Everytime I have told someone about this place, I have gotten a weird look and something to the tune of this response. Reddit isn’t really the most heavily regarded site in the eyes of some, so who would want to make a Knock-off Reddit
I am not Tom and I mean no harm at all to him, but I reckon he kind of just set this up in haste as a pet project (which is perfectly fine, I have had similar experiences)
The fact of the matter is, this is a Reddit knockoff. You cannot deny it. And the main reason you cannot deny it is because it’s literally in the name. However we can claim that the upvote/downvote layout is just a bog-standard forum layout (quite a few sites like Stack Overflow use it now anyway)
And I think this community is better than being named after a Reddit knockoff.
Feddit.UK’s doomed future.
Feddit.UK has two inevitable futures.
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- The Fediverse loses hype along with lemmy and everyone who wants to join has joined. We fade into obscurity.
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- We keep growing, and then Reddit will eventually notice and will shut us down because we literally are infringing their copyright. We have no basis or ground to defend that.
My proposal to you:
We change domains, preferably to Quackhouse.uk. We even had a logo and a mascot designed 🦆. We were on the verge of launching it as well, domain bought, server bought.
My proposed method.
I don’t think we should see this as making a new community per say, but making an extension of an already existing house and moving our good stuff over to the new part of the building. Or even better yet; just a name change
We do this in phases:
1: The hatching: Once we have everything soon enough settled, we make Quackhouse.UK as it was planned. Enable sign ups.
2: The Flock Migration: We migrate all of our main staple-UK communities over to Quackhouse. Eventually culminating in them being closed here through turning off posting.
- Shut down Feddit.UK sign-ups. Keep the instance itself running forever unless Reddit get angry. People can keep their feddit accounts, just keep it updated for legacy’s sake. Put no pressure on Feddit users to migrate their accounts, but maybe offer the option.
Why not make Quackhouse a separate Instance and keep Feddit.UK unlocked? Right now, Feddit.UK is the Go-To place for British Discourse on Lemmy. We need the whole community behind this and unity. If we keep Feddit.UK up, then it will likely choke out Quackhouse’s communities as there would be no reason to switch. Quackhouse was always planned to be a new home for Feddit.UK users. However, now Tom has kind of come in last minute and… Well… our plans are a bit screwed.
Feddit.de is fine, though?
For now it is, I feel it will face a similar fate if it grows. Reddit is not going to like this violation one way or another.
All country specific instances uses feddit
While that holds a bit of water, there’s no reason why we have to conform to that.
Opinion
I think it’s more worthwhile inconveniencing people to resub to specific communties rather than letting them die in the inevitable downfall.
Summary
Feddit.uk is a problemed name and it needs to be changed. I propose we push on with changing it promptly, but when the time is right. It should be done in a way so that people don’t lose their existing feddit.uk accounts.
alright, i’ll spot you some background info :)
the initial reasoning was that the domain decision would have been a fait accompli for us all - if feddit.uk died, then users would either move to the new instance organized by the same power users, or accept moving elsewhere. as such, it would be a waste of time making a full forum post and spending weeks bickering on (what was) a dying forum, when none of the respondents would have been the ones putting their credit card on the line for it anyway. remember, at this point, there were no admin/mod facilities on feddit.uk - if someone wanted to go absolutely ham on the feddit.uk instance, we would have all be screwed. time was of the essence here
given the speed that things were moving to ensure a smooth transition, something had to give to speed up the process, and so a full community consent was one of those things on the chopping block. there just wasn’t enough time for that before we faced full defederation and user exodus, on the initial timeline that was happening. however, a healthy debate was hosted for at least a week at the matrix space, and an approval vote was taken amongst those invested in the discussion, to whittle it down, such that progress could be made. the reasoning being, if a user was enough of an active user to have read all the feddit.uk meta threads that pointed them to the matrix space, and then joined that space to learn more, then they were obviously an invested user. users on feddit.uk were given plenty of pointers and hints to join the matrix space to discuss our future, and as such, it was confident that whatever was chosen through the vote by the matrix users would have had some community buy-in regardless of which option won.
for anyone with concerns about this from a “small cabal chooses a name” standpoint, consider that feddit.uk was decided by just one person. so, 🤷. why care? it wouldn’t have been the end of the world even if the domain was picked by executive fiat
domain was kept secret initially to prevent sniping, and secondly to prevent users trying to signup somewhere that wasn’t ready, and getting frustrated. i.e, keep it secret until point of no return.
but now? well, now it’s not so clear cut at all, lol. i’m thankful we didn’t have to go through a community fracture, but there’s a lot of work that must be shelved for the time being.
i think we need time for the dust to settle, let our new admins wrangle the website back into compliance with broader federation, and then we can have the identity debate.
when that time comes, i still vote for quackhouse though, absolutely 100%. it’s far superior to every other option we raised. 🦆
side note: my suggestion to anyone who wants to say “i dont like it” is to do better than to so easily say “i don’t like it”, and instead, provide your own damn counter proposal, and then say why yours is better. in the first week of discussion, we had quite a few “i dont like that” voices, and very little constructive “how about this?” voices. justify why your idea is better. 💪