Anyone else a little disappointed how the blackout is going?

I think a lot of (Americans, at least) have poorly understood ideas about what protesting is and how it's supposed to work--in no small part, I think, due to the sanitized way we're taught about things like the Civil Rights movement. The idea that a simple show of solidarity with an announced end date would, I guess, guilt trip(?) Spez into doing the right thing was always an absurd idea, divorced from reality, and only slightly better than doing nothing at all. There's been headlines all day about Spez's comments about waiting for the blackout to blow over, but that's pretty explicitly what the people behind the blackout said would happen.

Admittedly, prolonged blackouts will probably just lead to the offending moderators being replaced with new, compliant mods, but that's still the preferable outcome. It at least leverages the unpaid but not unskilled labor moderators currently put into Reddit into something vaguely tangible--the effective and smooth running of otherwise unwieldy subreddits. Large-scale subreddits that can only function with expansive moderator tools, automod, etc. will potentially suffer noticeably when being operated by new scab mods. That decreased user experience would actually be potentially effective.

It's also why federation is important. Maybe I'm just old and miss the web 1.0 days, but the current social media landscape is a cancer of enshittification. Kevin Rose killed Digg, Mark Zuckerberg killed Facebook (and Instagram), and Spez is killing Reddit. We need a decentralized internet, even if it's intuitive at first.

Spot on, federation and decentralization is the right path forward. Users create the content and should own it, the output of our time and typing has value and shouldn't be siloed away in corporate money making machines run by sociopaths. It should belong to the people to help us connect to each other.
If I could upvote this a million times, I would.
Most of us would not have tried out lemmy and kbin if reddit didn't implode. It's a bit rough being so new but it's promising and content is flowing.
- Agreed! It’s definitely a big challenging to get my footing on these new sites, but figuring out Reddit at first was the same. Also, many of the subreddits I used have ~similar equivalents on these other platforms, which is nice to see
@soratoyuki

@Haunting_Tale_5150
- Success will be measured in $$$ and that's loss of ad revenue. So far, no revenue has been lost because all the buys were placed and paid for pre-Blackout.
  
  The acid test is the 2-weeks from the Blackout - will advertisers flee Reddit for more stable/predictable pastures OR will u/spez and company be able to talk them in to staying by offering concessions for the disruptions in audience delivery?
  
  Stay tuned until July 1: u/spez doesn't seem like a real flexible kinda guy so far but we don't know what's going on behind the scenes.
I agree it's not effective. But any protest shouldn't be wild thing that puts everyone involved into dark.
Announcing it and planning it so it sends message but isn't making everyone life worse than needed, is proper way to do it.
If it's not effective, just do it again for week/ month / move your subscribers elsewhere / etc ... but let everyone involved know an keep it civil. Bad guys will reveal themselves along the way.

In this regard, IMHO those who participated didn't do it wrong way but those who didn't listen wronged the community as whole.

Rossman was correct in one of his videos. Community gotta stuck together and not fight each other, that's the only way to fight those power hungry companies.

I agree decentralized internet is good. Many small competitors are better than one huge mobidick that can't see it's own tail anymore so. it rolls over anyone in the way.
Honestly, part of what makes sites shitty is isn't just the pursuit of profit over all else, but also the Eternal September. On the internet, quantity follows quality -- that is, a high quality discussion board with a small to medium population will come into being, then everyone else will start moving toward it, and as more people show up, it gets more and more toxic, until the quality drops. I'm hoping that the fediverse will to some extent be able to alleviate that by allowing people to split off to some extent without having to leave completely.

We can only do what we can do.

I think of the 90-9-1 rule. If 10% of users leave or spend less time, there’s less content. Less content means the 90% will go elsewhere.

With something as big as Reddit it was never going to be easy, it was never going to be quick. But this will hurt them.

Don’t think about it as a war lost, think of it as a battle lost, but serious damage done.

Also don’t go back, that’s exactly what they’re betting on.

I've already deleted my account, and honestly? I don't miss Reddit. I get the sense that the migration will be a rather lengthy process, since moving entire communities of loosely associated individuals from one platform to another is inevitably going to be a tad messy and sluggish.

No, not really. I think a lot of people just have wrong expectations of what the blackout could actually do. Your average Reddit user doesn't care about anything that's going on. They care about consuming their content in the most convenient way. If their main subreddits are closed that isn't to migrate to a new platform but to a different subreddit. It took 6-7 months for Digg to lose a significant user base of their platform after their terrible changes. The same timeline will apply to Reddit. Expecting it over 2-3 days is just unrealistic.

It would also defeat the purpose of the blackout. The blackout wasn't to get people to move to a different platform but for Reddit to change its decision. If this is done with a scorched earth strategy Reddit would still die even if they reverse their decision. Right now Reddit still has an easy out of their decision. Rather than being forced to change they can say they merely listened to their passionate user base. They can even come up with a new solution, for example, hiring the Apollo dev to rework their own app. Obviously, Steve Huffman would need to go first for that to be an option. But there are plenty of options available that continue for Reddit to be the most convenient way to spread certain content.

Let's face it, the current Reddit alternatives lack content. Your average user would get bored here within minutes because there is not much here. It's inconvenient to find new Magazines. And even if they find one that's a copy of their favorite subreddit, it's mostly empty with barely any new posts showing up. At least nowhere near the rate it used to on Reddit.
But luckily people who do create a lot of content are the ones most likely to get fed up with the changes of Reddit. They are more likely to use third-party apps or extensions because the default Reddit version is so bad. It will just take time. Because for now no change can't be felt. Apollo is even still up and running and so is every other app/extension that uses the API. So the real decline will happen after June 30. That's the date when users will start to feel the need to migrate.

The actual win is if the Google algorithm starts to deprioritize reddit results due to communities being privated.

Edit: I can even see Google or other big techs pouncing on the opportunity to take the community for themselves, or simply using search deprioritization to drive reddit to the brink and buying it out

Though it's causing folks to look at other alternatives, and realize it would be a good idea to have one. So even if communities don't end up moving, Reddit's power is reduced slightly, just because other places do exist.

Let's say...

Reddit & API users negotiate a middle ground and 3rd party apps are allowed to stay: The community still loses.
Reddit buys one of the better third party apps and replaces/integrates it with the default app: We all know what will happen next.
Reddit does a full-stop 180, cancels all API changes, and apologizes: It's only a matter of time until they try again.

Enshitification has infected Reddit. So to be perfectly honest, I don't really care how the blackout is going because no matter how it turns out, I don't think I really want to be there to watch it continue its deterioration.

Same, I'm leaving reddit for good.
I deleted all my past content and deleted the accounts. Tbh, I'm pretty disappointed in the very verbal dick riders who refused to join rhe protest. The whole attitude from those who remained of "I got mine so fuck everybody else" leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Its at the core of so many problems across society. Maybe this is just a fast way of filtering out a whole ton of garbage users at once, by leaving them behind.

I think mods don't want to lose the subreddits they've built up. It's hard to onboard users into the fediverse, and migrating would mean those communities take a big hit. Perhaps it's hard for the mods to onboard with lemmy too? But I agree that everything that protest did was ultimately toothless. Now reddit is just removing mods and installing their own pro-reddit mods.

It's all kind of unfortunate. Reddit controls a massive, mature set of communities that are ultimately very convenient and easy to access. Lemmy, in comparison, is a little tricky to get started with. That said, I love the smaller communities with less trolls, no ads, and no bots. I plan to heavily reduce my reddit usage and hopefully transition more and more to lemmy.

The protest was pretty poorly thought out tbh. I pointed that out a few days ago and got hate for lol. Indeed they should've pointed to some other platform to move to. Informative subs should've done restricted instead of private. etc.

I think folks are really holding out hope for a 180 from Reddit leadership and I get that, I’ve been on Reddit long enough that I have a relationship and an emotional attachment to the platform.

But there is no sign of a 180 and maybe the worlds better for that as we can create something new.
- Same. I have been on reddit since a long time before they closed the source (i'd guess, close to 15 years?). I kind of miss it. It was part of my life every single day for so long, and then spaz had to go and fuck everything up. Ugh. Anyway, kbin is better already. so fuck spaz.
- There was a moment in the first Digg revolt where the digg admins were like we hear you, go ahead, post the AAC encryption key. We'll go into the future together. It hit like crack and we want to see it again, especially since spez and Alexis were cheering that shit on at the time
A better protest should have been to use your accounts to turn the site content into something that negatively effects the average user. Make trash posts that do not relate to the subs content and have it heavily upvoted. Mass downvote anything relevant. It was always the quality of the content that its users brought to Reddit that makes people stay. Going dark was a start, but in the end, Reddit can just turn it back on. Trying to quality control content on a post-by-post, day-by-day would be even tougher. If the mods are a part of it as well, Reddit would have to completely overhaul all their mods AND then try to convince another poor sap to do all that work for free.

I was hoping the threat of the blackout would be enough, but Reddit knows what it wants and will either force the change or die trying. This is not good community stewardship. We should all find a new home.

The win from the protest for me is discovering the Feddiverse. In time it will be just as good as Reddit for community and information. I intend to use it, and support it though content and money.

This is the thing for me too, I just don't want to be in a community where the mods/owners don't care AT ALL about the community and are unwilling to listen. That feels like any other social media to me, and it is not what I was on Reddit for.
I was hoping the threat of the blackout would be enough, but Reddit knows what it wants and will either force the change or die trying. This is not good community stewardship. We should all find a new home.

Well said. I'd add that the Enshittification is complete for Reddit.

I don't care. I'm very happy to have discovered kbin et al. So much room for activities!

I mean, it only has this basic web interface on mobile and it’s already much more intuitive than the official reddit app they’re trying to push…
- Same with Lemmy. I think kbin and Lemmy are good because they're relatively uncomplicated. Reddit's been adding junk for years which has bloated out the new site and app significantly. They spend a long time and lots of money developing some NFT thing for example.

No, don't point redditors to our servers, let them find by themselves. It's a great filter. If someone is motivated enough to leave reddit then he will find us.

I don't think this is the best strategy; I think if we want people to leave we should make it as easy as possible. We can't just prioritize the people who will take the time to learn and understand federated spaces, and google search or whatever to find us; in terms of user volume, if we want to be competitive, we need average users, too.
- Yeah, just like in reddit, there’s no need to filter people out of the site… since you can just stick to the communities you prefer.
- well, personally, I don't really care if people come here or not. I want that people who want to be here to be here, but not for this to be a massive site where everybody comes because it is "the new reddit".
  
  And I also don't think about everyone leaving Reddit. The new Reddit works for some folks, not for us, so we come here and some other places. I don't want it to die either, it's just not my cup of tea anymore

I think the blackout is counter productive to continue. The idea was to try and convince reddit to change their minds, but as we can see now that is simply not going to happen. you can't convince someone who is unreasonable with logic. The way it has gone is that there has been a large influx of people trying things like kbin and lemmy, and the experience has not been smooth. lemmy.ml being immediately overloaded, and continuing to be difficult to federate with reliably is a problem, and not one just for that instance. It creates a sour view of the network (especially with other instances running into issues that seem to be scaling issues with the lemmy software). I think kbin has had some scaling issues that required using a large cdn to even try to cope with. The problem there is that if you look at the traffic of some of the largest federated reddit replacements, it is almost nothing in the grand scheme of things. The number of communities is very small, and those that exist have thread counts in the double digits at best. Most of that is due to the hyper isolation and fragmentation of instances due to federation issues at scale.

In the end I think every sub should call it a day on blackout. Go back to normal and make it clear that reddit hasn't won, you are just regrouping. Then give the software devs a bit more time to work before the 3rd party apps go offline for the final time. use the initial blackout as a scream test, and wait for reddit to disable themselves by revoking api access. Hopefully by then many of the larger issues with reddit like federated alternatives can be resolved, or at the very least minimized, so the transition away from reddit can take place quickly and easily.

You don't have to scare Spez, you have to scare advertisers and investors. If the blackout were announced to be indefinitely, I imagine it would certainly cause people to act. Of course that would mean more people stick to Reddit if they reduce their unreasonable pricing.