Some general thoughts. I have done multiple CMS transfers of large sites involving Wordpress, Drupal and Discourse. No matter what plugin you find that supposedly will do the job, in my experience it is always a PITA that ends up involving a lot of programming. That’s why the simplest option would be to stay as close to Wordpress as possible, using a fork for example to fix to the ethical problems you perceive. Otherwise you’re almost certainly going to find it’s much easier to archive and start afresh, with the compromises that implies.

If you do dump Wordpress, in your position I would go for a database-less static site generator like Hugo. So much simpler and more secure. But that’s just my opinion.

For a successful community, this one (which I also lurk in) is oddly topic-specific. They must be doing something right. Copy them!

This is what RSS was invented for. Sigh.

PS: https://rssbox.us-west-2.elasticbeanstalk.com/

And we were told cancel culture had peaked.

this place is never going to be good for any discussions where people disagree strongly.

Most users downvote what they dont agree with. Its a circle jerk echo chamber where we all agree or get downvoted.

So true, and so sad. This has been such a disappointment to me, and even a bit of a surprise. I just didn’t realize how badly most people respond to seeing viewpoints they don’t fully share. Personally I don’t get the point of discussion where everyone agrees, but apparently that is quite a rare attitude. So I share your pessimism, but with one glimmer of hope. There is at least one forum which has cracked this problem: Hacker News. The issue being that it’s frequented by exactly the kind of techie Spock-like personalities that aren’t representative of the general population.

That’s fair. The R-site does not have any ATProto clone yet, is that correct? Lemmy is still mostly a ghost town for non-techie discussion. As I understand it, Bluesky is already a moderately successful replacement for Twitter. My general point is that we cannot afford a 3-way struggle between corporate social media, ATProto and the fediverse (i.e. ActivityPub). There just isn’t enough attention to go round.

Great news. What would be useful: a quick primer on what exactly the end user needs to do in order to interact with Bluesky (AKA Twitter 2.0) from a fediverse account.

Disclaimer: IMO Bluesky has eaten part of the fediverse’s lunch and there’s now no beating it entirely, we’ll need to compromise and join forces.

I’m trying to think of something to say in riposte in order to boost the comment count.

Agreed. This seems like the lowest hanging fruit, the absolute minimal solution.

Given the emergence of Bluesky and the parallel rightwing echo chambers, the fediverse does not have the luxury of splittism IMO.

This is my analysis too. And why, instead of just upvoting posts that interest me, I try to think of something to say about them too. The dreaded “0 comments” is never a good look no matter how we much we tell ourselves that it doesn’t matter.

For this reason I tend to believe that many communities just have too much primary content. Too many posts and not enough comments.

Thought experiment. 2 communities:

• /c/one has 15 posts per day, 5 of them with 3 comments, the other 10 with none
• /c/two has 3 posts per day with 5 comments each

Which is the healthier community?