The community already exists, it’s just that they are located in a place where we don’t want to be.

Both of us are just going to have to acknowledge that our thoughts around online communities are very different.

Back in June I was thinking along the same lines as your good self, as in “what can we do to move /r/whatever to whateverinstance.tld/c/whatever”. I eventually realised that not only is that not possible, it’s antithetical to the idea of online communities.

An online community is not a set of users, it’s a combination of culture and momentum. Sure there might be a few key core personalities that everyone recognises from day to day, but if those users left the community would continue because it has an established culture and momentum - a collective recollection that this is the place to go for a certain flavor of content and engagement with that content.

The thing is, you can’t force it. You can’t create a culture because it’s a combined input from many people. All you can do is create the environment within which the right type of culture will coalesce. You can’t herd the swarm of bees that is /r/electronics to /c/electronics. All you can do is make /c/electronics the most favorable place to build a hive and have confidence that /r/electronics is becoming less favorable over time.

I mean, look at this community: last post is from 27 days ago. Do you really think that it is doing well by itself?

The solution I’m proposing is to post real actual content. Subscribe to some rss feeds, look at old magazines, ponder questions for discussion. Any single post like this has 100 times the value of something re-posted from reddit.

We had over 100k MAU in July. We are down to 35k and it keeps going down.

That’s one metric. It doesn’t feel like content and engagement has really reduced much in the last several months. Honestly I suspect that the orchestrators of the influx of bots in July have realised that other platforms are more fertile for scams and manipulation et cetera.

Besides which, even if valued users are leaving, that’s kind of disappointing but a re-post bot isn’t going to change that. The kinds of community builders you’re looking for are critical thinkers like your good self putting effort into building good communities.

The comment would not be coming from a bot account

Foregive me, I’m not familiar with alien.top - I’ll have to take a look.

Technically, such a bridge is going to be interesting I guess and I have to concede that in some cases it might facilitate discussion.

That said, it’s still based on the (IMO flawed) premise that mirroring content from reddit is the right move. From my impractical purist / idealist perspective. Lemmy should not seek to be new-reddit. Just let lemmy be lemmy - allow it’s culture and communities to emerge and coalesce in their own time.