iPhone subreddit starting protest early, going dark indefinitely

The loss of the forum like help threads will probably be the most impactful thing. We can build communities elsewhere, but the 8 years old post about a problem only you and the OP is having is super valuable.

I'd like to add a comment here just to add some visibility:
If you have an uncapped/unlimited internet connection, you should seriously consider running the Archive Team Warrior
They're heavily involved in scraping and archiving data from all over the internet (and, recently, most/all of Reddit) so that it's preserved, regardless of what happens to the underlying platform.
I run it on my home server in docker, but they have a lot of options for doing so and it basically requires just running it, and then forgetting it exists.
- It can also be ran as an appliance in a virtual machine like VirtualBox!
- Awesome, going to set this up later at home today!
I feel that. I posted about a Plex problem 2 years ago and the subsequent solution I worked out. Every once in a while I still get someone replying to that and thanking me.
There was talk of someone populating a Lemmy instance with reddit data.
There is a lot of reddit data on a torrent somewhere aparrently.
Not only that. But if Reddit really suffers badly from this it might also have an impact on small communities. It's really simple to set up a community on any topic on there. And it's currently mainstream enough that you can get people on-boarded pretty quickly.
Larger communities may find a new home elsewhere. But for smaller ones that feels much more difficult.
Thanks to last week's fiasco I discovered the fediverse and hopefully others too. I just hope it's intuitive enough that people don't get scared away.
- But for smaller ones that feels much more difficult.
  I guess that's kind of the beauty of federation here. If somebody is brought in for other stuff, they'll likely see when their hobby/niche/etc community becomes a thing because surely somebody else will subscribe to something on that server
That's the thing that bothered me the most about deleting my account. I had multiple people say thanks for posting solutions and problems with solutions I had, even years later. Not specific to iphone but in general.
- Good thing I've never been of any use to anyone then :)
  ... :'(
That's a problem with every non-physical storage of data/knowledge - it's ephemeral and can disappear anytime
- Physical media can suffer the same fate, but not usually at the hands of a single entity.
- From time to time I do think about the Carrington Event and wonder what would happen if something like that happened in today's time. Because of exactly the reason of how reliant we are on electronical data.
  How resilient is our infrastructure really? Especially satellites used for communication. I assume that most critical cold-storage is mostly fine. But all the small personal electronic devices will probably be toast.
yep. this is why i might still occasionally use reddit after this. r/askmechanics was so incredibly useful
My hope is that things like Chat GPT can now become that source. I can only assume all those historical posts were used as training data.
- ChatGPT doesn't understand the things it says. It shouldn't be treated as a source of truth. It can be tripped up by nuance, or by statements which require an understanding of the concept of syntax. For example, if you ask it what is the longest 5-letter word, it will confidently give you an answer.
- I made sure to delete all my Reddit data before deleting my account. Not getting anything from me.

It's a shame promoting Lemmy isn't part of the blackout

It's been attempted in various spots, but either reddit itself removes the mentions or edits them out
- Yeah the fact that they actually banned the kbinmigration subreddit is absolutely WILD to me. I made a comment on a post a couple of weeks ago now about how this wouldn't change anything, and a few people would leave like the last time they did something that made people upset, but most people would stay. After the ama and everything last week though I've completely changed my mind, I was wrong.
- Is that really something that's been happening?
- They delete comments referencing lemmy
- Yikes
True that. Kinda weird actually to go dark but not providing alternative avenue.
I've been promoting Lemmy for the past few days and have gotten my comments removed and downvoted by people claiming that Lemmy was a far left recruiting ground for domestic terrorism lmao
- I know, right?
  I'm an INTERNATIONAL terrorist, thank you very much.
  I'm not about to destroy my OWN country... my government at least does THAT for me!
  😄

I am so happy to see people coming together and moving away from commercial platforms. It feels silly to say it, but it seems like it is a step in the right direction. It is technological and social progress. Decentralization is a really fantastic tool and it seems to be a system that cannot be controlled internally or externally. Mastodon has been great, and I expect Lemmy to be even better.

To anyone reading, if you have any extra cash, look into making a small donation to your instance. The people running it are not just putting in time, they are likely paying hundreds a month to rent server space.

Money is going to be the deciding factor in the long-term health of the entire Fediverse. More users on each instance means more costs -- and to some extent, even users not on that instance will contribute to cost. That money has to come from somewhere, and eventually, if the Fediverse is going to scale up to even a sizable portion of what we're moving away from, we need real, consistent money involved. It doesn't have to be full VC corpo junk, but eventually, some instances are going to need a team.
I want this stuff to work great, but expecting the people running it to pay the cost forever isn't sustainable.
- would it be a good idea to have comment/post rewards like gold/silver etc. where the proceeds go to help fund instances?
- People are usually more willing to spend some money on community projects such as an instance they like. This could be a financially viable way to fund online platforms like Lemmy.
- They could add the sites as brave creators and get some revenue from that.Its depends on the number of users but anything helps
Well said 👏👏

Good. I’m done with reddit forever.

I suppose many there are also affected by the Apollo debacle too. It just makes that pill even more bitter.

I think so. With the end of Apollo, I have no other way to access Reddit except their mobile website or their app. I have the feeling it’s too late now, Apollo is unlikely to come back, regardless of what Reddit does. Now, I just hope kbin / lemmy will grow enough to become a good alternative (still learning how everything works ^^).
- Even if they reversed the API changes, sacked Spez, reinstated i.reddit.com, ate an entire bucket of humble pie, and personally paid me £100 I'd still prefer the vibe here to be honest. It's way less angry and more authentic here.
- Yes, Kbin/lemmy needs enough good and original content to flourish. What I currently miss is the niche subreddits on lemmy. For specific brands or particular products or hobbies it's easy to find a community on reddit, but there are only a few already available on lemmy.
- Reddit is already starting to shut down mobile browser access. They’re doing it in waves.

This is great, many more subreddits should do something like this. But in the end, it’s us, the end users, who should do the actual protesting since it’s us who have the power to change things. I’ve decided not to give them any kind of traffic from now on. Me, by myself, won’t make much impact but if more of us did the same they’d be force to change their strategy.

Subreddits doing this will have a much bigger impact than end users, because large masses of people will never do anything inconvenient on their own. This is the reason why capitalism doesn't self-regulate for better environmental standards, for an example. The whole personal carbon footprint thing was invented by an oil company to shame individuals so we can blame eachother for our consumption instead of regulating energy companies. Nothing changes if we rely on everyone to do the right thing without any external motivations (be it environmental regulations or closing subreddits).
That's not to say you shouldn't also look at your own actions - personally I deleted Apollo on my phone and blocked the reddit domains on my work laptop and home network. But big players (I.e big subreddits) need to be part of the change.
- This is a great video on the carbon footprint campaign: https://youtu.be/1J9LOqiXdpE

Anything short of indefinite is just a virtue signal, imo.

I hope there's enough information there for refugees to arrive here safely

I own a subreddit that I'll admit that it isn't the largest but I'm going to be putting a link to the new corresponding Kbin magazine in the private message. I'm hoping other subreddits will as well
- You're doing the lord's work
There have been some privacy concerns regarding Lenny's implementation (deleted posts and whatnot). Which has kept some users second-guessing the change. I have tried aether before coming here, but sadly, there are not enough people there.
I just hope that the community from Reddit doesn't spread itself out too much :(
- I just hope that the community from Reddit doesn’t spread itself out too much :(
  Why? Decentralisation is a good thing.
It’s more complicated than signing up for Reddit, but really just by 1 degree.
I’m lurking Reddit a bit on Apollo still and see so many posts that have “Grandma trying to figure out a smartphone” energy making it seem like some insurmountable task, or complaining about the questionnaire without stopping to realize what a tidal wave of signups is happening.
Perhaps it’s for the best. If people can’t be bothered for something so simple, they might not be good fits anyways.
- undefined>It’s more complicated than signing up for Reddit, but really just by 1 degree.
  I don't know. There are fundamental differences that make lemmy a lot harder to get into. Start by choosing an instance. Add to that, that this decision is pretty much final. No moving accounts ever. Then you get into the fragmentation of communities. is the lemmy.ml, lemmy.world or some other community the "main" one? The base benefits of decentralization are also it's main issues at the moment. Lemmy needs to get something in place to move accounts cross instance including linking posts and subscriptions. Additionally, Communities need to be able to span multiple instances for various reasons. Mostly to gather people in one place, but also to spread the load. And not the least to also decentralize data. While lemmy as a whole might be decentralized, a community sits on one instance. And once the owner doesn't want to run it anymore, everything is gone.

the only thing that's worrying me about the subreddits closing indefinitely (even though I wholeheartedly support it), is that people are going to use even more closed off, unsearchable platforms as alternatives. /r/unixporn mods say their only "official" alternative is currently their Discord "server".

edit: the message on /r/iPhone also directs people to their Discord. sigh.

I second this. For a while, adding "reddit" to every google search gives generally better results. Now all this information will become hidden in unsearchable places.
- Which is a good case against the centralization of information.
  I have been way to comfortable just using Reddit as my source of information with the usage of 3rd party applications.
  What if Reddit puts the subreddits behind a paywall?
  What if Reddit is gonna demand that every subreddit generates an x percentage revenue just to exist?
  What Reddit has shown with their actions is that they are gonna put monetization of their userbase first and user experience somewhere in 10th.
  The possibilities to screw the users in regards of the information they consume is...worrying.
  It will end up the same as 9gag did. Some weird facebook/instagram/tik tok clone used for people who have an attention span of 60 seconds.
- Also what happens when a ton of users delete their content, as I just did yesterday. I participated in quite a bit of tech support chat on reddit, and now all of that is gone.
Not that I think it would happen, but I wonder if Discord could theoretically make publicly discoverable servers directly visible and indexable online?
Discord already has and maintains a web accessed variant of the platform. It’d require some UI for users not logged in and users not registered with a particular publicly visible server, but I’d wager it’s possible. Probably a nightmare to revamp the back-end to make it possible, but possible. It’d kinda feel like how Twitter is indexed and publicly searchable, but platform registration is required to participate, with Discord having the extra layer of server membership on top of a platform account.
It’d probably do nothing about servers that fall in a sort of visibility limbo, though, like servers that are significantly populated but invisible to Discord’s server discovery. Still, I like to daydream that kind of thing would put a dent on the platform’s information visibility issues 🤔.
- I've seen that a lot of mods are holding power. They want users to migrate to discord because they are mods over there too. Each time I've posted one of my communities here I get shadow banned or posts removed. Gets really annoying

I hope that this protest does something

It will. It will make the mods and the power-users realise that Reddit don’t care and won’t change course. Then it’s up to them.
- I completely agree. Reddit has shown no indication of backing down. They will just wait for it to finish if the lockdown is as short as ~48 hours. If a major/big sub goes on lockdown indefinitely, they'll open it and replace the mods. I'm pretty sure there are tons of people out there willing to mod a big subreddit like r/videos for one reason or another. The reddit of the digg migration era is gone. It's just corporate reddit now.
- I don't give it much time until they start replacing the mods if the blackout drags on for long.
I’m sceptical. If most subs only protest for 2 days, then all Reddit has to do is weather the storm and then continue on. The only way I see it having any further impact is if many large subs black out indefinitely.
Reddit would either be forced to make concessions or escalate even further by removing the mods of the protesting subs and forcing it open again. That would be a further sign of bad faith and really piss off all these mods that spent up to a decade doing moderation for free.
- You make it sound like Reddit does not have the option to turn the subreddit on and replace the mods. However, the users who actually really do care about reddit will leave and will have to take their content with them.
Agree. I ended up deleting my 11+ year old account. I was holding out that they’d reverse course but I felt like they also need to see some users leaving as well.

!iphone@lemmy.ml is one offspring

I’m worried that all the new large communities are hosted at a single instance, lemmy.ml
Bummer that they’re vetting all new subscribers for an iPhone community. Seems like an aggressive gatekeeping tactic for a benign topic.
- I've heard in other lemmy communities that the vetting is mostly an attempt at an anti-spammer( and anti-troll) measure.
- They are? I was able to subscribe immediately. Wonder if it’s just being slow now. A few things I’ve subscribed to the last day or so have been slow to show up on my subscription list and I assumed it was the influx from Rexxit bogging things down a bit.
Sucks that the UI doesn't auto-link that for you.
- that Is currently an issue on the radar. Lets hope it gets picked up quickly
- Yeah, but we can help out in the meantime!
  iphone@lemmy.ml
  And if you need the full url for your instance's search: https://lemmy.ml/c/iphone
is there a way to browse the newest subs in the instance?
- There are two excellent lists I’ve seen. One is a community/sub browser made by someone on feddit.de, the other is a comprehensive list of reddit subs that have been duplicated in the Fediverse. (That one is surprisingly huge!). I didn’t make note of either of those, but surely someone will be along shortly with the links.

I'm glad some subreddits are going dark for good, not only will this actually hurt reddit as a company but also it will lead to some people switching to alternatives like lemmy which is always a good thing.

Good. Only way users and communities can be heard is to actively shutdown until further notice

The Reddit community from which
!196@lemmy.blahaj.zone is an offshoot from does this.

They went dark indefinitely (until (or if) the API changes are cancelled/undone.

Lol I can’t wait till this is national news, right before they go for their IPO.

Wouldn't be suprised if more subreddits will follow and start early.

It also has more impact to do it out of the blue.

I would too, given what’s happened recently.