After weeks of burning through users’ goodwill, Reddit is facing a moderator strike and an exodus of its most important users. It’s the latest example of a social media site making a critical mistake: users aren’t there for the services, they’re there for the community. Building barriers to access.....
From the article:
Moving to the Fediverse
This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge. A social network built on an open protocol can afford some host-agnosticism, and allow communities to persist even if individual hosts fail or start to abuse their power. Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary, as we saw last fall when Twitter cracked down on discussions of its Fediverse-alternative, Mastodon.
This is the best most comprehensive article written on this subject. And there is a link to every other article. As usual EFF does their homework and applies their judgement to describe perfectly:
The heart of this fight is for what Reddit’s CEO calls their “valuable corpus of data,” i.e. the user-made content on the company’s servers, and for who gets live off this digital commons. While Reddit provides essential infrastructural support, these community developers and moderators make the site worth visiting, and any worthwhile content is the fruit of their volunteer labor. It’s this labor and worker solidarity which gives users unique leverage over the platform, in contrast to past backlash to other platforms.
@twistedtxb@dirtmayor Completely agree. The fact that people from all over the web using different services can engage is amazing (hello from mastodon!)
This seriously blows my mind. You're commenting from Mastodon on a Beehaw thread which I'm reading and replying via Fedia.io. All this interconnection is amazing; it truly embodies the concept of an internet.
We should remind people that we have zero qualms about email which is essentially a federated service. You can be on Gmail, Yahoo, or Bing and trust that your message will be delivered to where you point it.
The only difference being that email is pointed to a particular user on a given instance, and here messages are pointed to magazines/communities.
I completely agree with this and I think it's because of the legal issues it avoids. I'm not a lawyer, but if I'm not mistaken, the entire fediverse doesn't take a hit if a single server is a bad actor. Whereas sites like Reddit and Twitter need to defend themselves based on the content users generate.
Unbridled capitalism is destroying the internet everything it touches.
When the ONLY motive for doing (or not doing) something is profit, things go to sit sooner or later. The example I often use is that we actually have enough food in the planet to feed everyone. We just throw a large portion of it away or destroy it, because in so many cases food is not made/grown to feed people, but to generate profits... Sad reality of late stage capitalism.
Agreed. A lot of it is due to misplaced or misrepresented priorities. If you don't account for human and environmental impacts in the proverbial "bottom line", you're gonna have a bad time. If we implemented metrics for sustainability and societal improvement as part of the "worth" or "profits" of a company, the world and our future in it may be a little less bleak of a place. Instead, the current system places waaay too much emphasis on short-term goals that are frankly not in line with what I would consider "productivity".
It is but the FOSS community and projects like the Fediverse and increasing decentralization will go a long way to countering monetisation and the capitalist mindset
I think it is more like the protoweb. How this works is more similar to BBSes, Usenet, IRC networks and the like from 30 years ago. Truly distributed networks with no central controlling mechanism and the systems communicate by simply agreeing on the technical protocol. That was what the internet was designed for i the first place. The last couple of decades where everything has been centralized to a few big megacorps is an abomination.
Since the fediverse unlike the rest of the web consists mostly of people hostile to aggressive monetisation there’s a built-in limit to how ‘capitalist’ (in the popular sense rather than the technical sense) an instance can be in terms of funding it. Instances will be forced to find alternative ways to pay the bills to the traditional ‘our users are the commodity we sell’ approach of the corporate social media platforms if they want to stick around for the long run which will be a fantastic thing for the web I think.
"History may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes" -Mark Twain
It definitely feels like a throw back to before we had these massive centralized 'social networks'.
Reddit will live on, but I think we'll see a shift to the fediverse. It's the best of both worlds. Smaller communities but with that big network feel if you want. Activity pub is great.
Web3 was suppose to be this decades revolution of the internet, where everything became interconnected and decentralized and without authority figures or something
Then cryptocurrency enthusiasts decided blockchain counts as that and starting calling everything related to cryptocurrency and Blockchain web3. So now web3 just means cryptocurrency, but they still act like it is the future of the entire internet. I think it is pretty dumb, who wants finances intrinsically tied to everything they do online?
I think web3.0 was supposed to live on Blockchains.
So, fully decentralised.
I think the partially decentralised format of the fediverse is a more sustainable model
Details about Reddit’s API-specific costs were not shared, but it is worth noting that an API request is commonly no more burdensome to a server than an HTML request, i.e. visiting or scraping a web page. Having an API just makes it easier for developers to maintain their automated requests.
Scraping is more burdensome for the platform since that serves up images, JavaScript, and other files required to render a page. Maybe dying I tools can avoid this.
Significantly so! An HTTP request probably means loading separate JS, CSS, and HTML documents. To say nothing of the weight of the requested page alone.
They're betting that the masses are too baked in to care. Reddit's CEO said it himself, they're counting on this to blow over. The best message you can send to them is to delete your reddit account and in the box that asks why you're doing so, tell them you're leaving for lemmy. Encourage your communities to follow you. This has happened one before with us old-timers who remember the Great Digg Migration. (Interesting internet history read if you have time.)
Part of me thinks they were planning on using the high rate as a negotiation tactic. Ask for twice what you want, then back down to your actual number.
Then the Apollo dev "miscommunication" happened and things got ugly. Maybe they'll still back down, but maybe they'll die on that hill.
The other part of me thinks they just want to kill 3p apps and this is the easiest way to do that. Just price them out. They probably had some accountant or MBA crunch numbers on how many people would leave vs how much more revenue driving people to their ad ridden hellscape of an app...and figured it was worth the bad press.
Hell, they probably saw what Netflix just did with account sharing and were like "they got more subscribers!!!".
I think we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Reddit. It will be slow at first then all at once.
Surviving is a pretty bad metric, especially for social media. Digg "survived". So did MySpace, Tumblr, and more. It's too soon to say about Twitter, but their future (in general) doesn't look very bright. They aren't going to disappear, but they also aren't going to be the cultural powerhouse they used to be.
More importantly, the move needs to be profitable. On the surface, it is- 3rd party app users don't currently bring in money. Converting any of them at all to paid or ad-viewing users yields a net profit, if you keep a narrow focus.
Having these users active and engaged on your platform has a value as well, but one that's really hard to quantify.
Because their intent is to force people to use their native applications. They're intentionally making it difficult/impossible for third party apps to exist. They're wagering that their clout surpasses the bad-will they'll get for the crummy move.
Then they can bombard everyonr with "he gets you" ads or whatever the most recent ad garbage is, and get their full revenue.
Sadly, Reddit has likely won the short-term battle. But hopefully, this Blackout raises awareness of the need for alternatives. Whether it be Lemmy/Kbin, some up-and-coming site like Squabbles or Tildes, or something not yet created, the seeds of migration off Reddit have been planted. If Reddit has such apathy for its communities pre-IPO, just imagine how bad it will be post-IPO when they are dealing with Wallstreet directly.
Reddit is only going to get worst over the next year. I came across this article a couple days ago while searching for early news coverage of the (then planned) blackout:
Hey there! I'm a human, not an ad. Hello fellow human! I see you're interested in [contextual keyword targeting]. I think you might be {emotion4} to learn about this related thing, [ad for jesus]!
Yeah a lot of naysayers had me convinced a short protest would do nothing, but you're right... This is about awareness. I've noticed particularly in the last year a downgrade in quality content on reddit and im sure others are noticing. Lemmy might not be ready yet, but it can be with some building inertia and useability improvements.
If they think people will left reddit in droves and reddit will shutdown during the blackout, yeah they are wrong. The blackout is about awareness, and during this short 48 hours, we already discovered swathes upon swathes of reddit alternatives, some are bigger than other, some are livelier than other, all within their communities yet federating each other, far from whateverthefuck spez is doing. And for that, the blackout is successful.
Lemmy or Kbin might be small, but hey, at least we can quite certain that we are human contributors, not bots.
"go to war" is a bit extreme, my one small subreddit I set to private, then left as the sole moderator and signed out of reddit. that is not war that is just leaving