So for someone who doesn’t want to use Reddit (probably quite a lot on Lemmy) these posts are gonna be filled with comments that they can’t really anwers to. That’s exactly what I mean by surreal ghost town.
There is an asymmetry here.
Judging by MAU, we have currently ~35k people on Lemmy because they are against Reddit. We have 300 million people on reddit who are on reddit because “it is where everyone else is”.
If the mirrors are creating 250k new mirror accounts per day, and if one fediverser instance can convert 0.1% of these per day, it’s 250 new users who “don’t care”. In one week, these ~1500 converted users will be in conversation on both networks, which will increase the number of non-bots in mirrored threads and be enough to stop the “ghost town” feeling.
I’m not talking hypotheticals. It is happening already some of the communities where I set this up.
I’m pretty sure that’s illegal in many places.
I’m pretty sure you are wrong. The archive project does not need consent from the users (or reddit) to archive their content. Mirror sites from twitter exist for years already, none of them have faced charges. The worst that Reddit can do is to revoke the keys by claiming violation of the terms of service.