As many people have recently noted, Reddit quietly became an extremely important repository of text-based knowledge. Distinct from Wikipedia and Archive.org, but no less important, Reddit is full of valuable procedural (how-to) and consumer (product-related) knowledge. Reddit has countless small communities built around hobbies and other niche interests, which places it in the same role once fulfilled by Usenet and later independent web-based forums.
While those technologies still exist, they face enormous challenges with discovery (try to find a new forum on Google recently?), single-sign-on, and moderation. These were all solved by Reddit and I believe lemmy solves them too. The fediverse [3] truly has the potential to liberate small internet communities from the vagaries of Big Social Media, of which Reddit is only the latest example.
I'm a technical user, and I closed join-lemmy.org after ten seconds because it was too many clicks to get to an interface that looked like Reddit. I did manage to find a community by clicking "join," and arbitrarily picking one of the communities on the page (which were presented in random order on every page load). I was disoriented and didn't know what this community was - did I land on the equivalent of a subreddit? Or is this a federated instance that includes all "subreddits" the server is connected to? Then I saw an intimidating user interface with sparse activity and low numbers of comments. So I concluded that if that's how I felt as a technically sophisticated user, then Lemmy doesn't stand a chance of gaining traction with the average redditor. I went back to Reddit and noticed most of the subs I like are done with their blackout.
Lemmy can succeed, but it needs a usable client that abstracts away the complexity of federation and choosing which servers to join. It seems like a perfect opportunity for Apollo, RIF, and the other award winning Reddit clients that are about to shut down. Why not port their apps to point to Lemmy backend(s) instead of Reddit? They could bring their loyal userbase to Lemmy, solving the chicken-and-egg problem and helping to bootstrap activity. And they can keep their UI, solving the problem of the intimidating user interface that would otherwise inhibit adoption of Lemmy.
It seems like there is a relatively straight-forward path to integration, but the opportunity window is probably closing soon. They'd need to act fast. The first step would probably be for Lemmy contributors to build an open source interopability layer that implements the Reddit API (maybe this already exists?), and for the client apps to figure out how to add one more layer of indirection to their interface ("servers").
Lemmy - A link aggregator for the fediverse.
Join a Server - Run a Server - Follow communities anywhere in the world
Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform.
No, no. You lead with the benefits to the user. This isn't Github.
It suffers from the same problem as Mastodon - "Join a server". But which one?
These federated things need to be set up so that there's "no wrong door". Enter anywhere, see the same stuff regardless of where it's hosted. Discovery and hosting may be distributed behind the scenes, but they have to have a unified user entry point.
USENET had that problem solved. It was federated, but it didn't look federated to the end user.
Honestly, I say this all the time but I think people just need to treat federation like it's email. The difference is that the "email threads" are public to all, rather than in your inbox.
This is what old reddit did so well. You just open reddit.com and you see a dense wall of stories, along with vote count, number of comments on each story, and which subreddit that particular story came from.
All in ZERO clicks. No images or graphics at all, aside from little thumbnails you can easily ignore. Minimal, dense, and clutter-free.
In terms of discovery, there is a centralised community browser of sorts... but you'll see it's got quite a way to go: https://browse.feddit.de
However, as someone willing to put the time in to learn something new I've found my efforts rewarded. It does take longer than 10 seconds to get used to Lemmy and the fediverse, but I'd say no longer than 15-20 minutes really. I enjoy being part of something new and I hope it lasts. Perhaps it won't hang on to many of the new users it has gained, but I expect this won't be the last time Reddit does something its users don't like and next time around more will stick, hopefully presenting a very good alternative.
My current list of grievances:
- No standards of any kind on sharing the same identity, e.g. between Lemmy and Mastodon.
- No support for any distributed multi-master database (I'm currently trying to see if I can hack Lemmy to work with CockroachDB, but I'm probably going to give up).
Is this actually an issue?
If you're looking for a straight up reddit alternative in all its scope, I can see it being an issue, but if we simply want a better iteration, then isn't one more catered to technical users, perhaps be a good thing?
To me this feels similar to windows vs linux. The pains you describe in learning to use lemmy reminds me of windows users who complain about linux not being exactly like windows, UI wise.
But for users like me, after having un-learned windows and customized my linux experience, the result is just downright better from any angle. Yes, it was a time investment learning the ropes, but it was worth it.
Perhaps the modern approach is to stop trying to be like the most populist standard, and embrace platforms that are midway between the social giants and obscure niches.
Thing is I _still_ closed the tab and will likely forget about it. Turns out that thousands of people posting nothing but complaints about "REDDIT EVIL", isn't that interesting to read.
Well, to be honest, that part does sound exactly like reddit.
But people fall on reddit by links to a public page somewhere, avoiding the empty page problem. After a short time on their site, I still don't know if I can link to a comment in Lemmy or if I can browse a community.
And edit: yes, each one of those servers has a web interface at their root that you can browse and link to. The link being name "join" doesn't make it obvious.
I find Lemmy frustrating to use and it isn't just growing pains: it's the same reason I find Mastodon frustrating. Do I care if username@somecommunity.infosec.somecommunity matters? Do I care if I use lemmy.world or do I have to find some server? Which server?
Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons.
This is just the reality. I wish people would focus on building services that meet peoples needs and not just as an expression of their idealogies.
That's kind of the point
Mastadon, Lemmy, Etc, they're not replacements for Reddit or Facebook. They're an alternative.
A social network doesn't require millions of users to be useful. It's okay that they're not for everyone.
> Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons.
For a technically inclined person on a largely technology focused forum, you sound an awful lot like a luddite.
There used to be a high barrier to entry for accessing the internet and making use of it. That changed over time. The same will likely happen for these types of non-centralised services.
It works until it doesn’t: when the host of a centralized community decides to make enemies with its users. This is an old story for many people who went through the Digg to Reddit migration.
Now people have had enough. Our communities are too important to leave in the hands of one company. It’s time for all the people who create 100% of the value on Reddit to have control over their own community’s future.
No what you are presenting is an argument for services that meet the needs of dumbest assumable users and centralization. It's the same unreflected argument as has been repeated over and over when it comes to Mastodon and it boils down to "everyone needs to be there or else it's a failure". Services like that obviously are fine too, but there is more than enough people that don't need or want that.
It speaks for a certain narrow mindedness that everything needs to be Silicon Valley's next big thing that will someday rock the stock market.
In reality Mastodon does not have the size of Twitter, and you might find it too difficult to use. However not everyone is that way, and it has over the last months proven to be a good alternative for users. It's potentially the same with Lemmy: It only needs to povide a cool alternative and enough users for meaningful interaction.
It does not need the popularity of reddit to be valid. And it does not need to be designed explicitly for the layperson. (not an excuse for a bad UI, but with new Reddit the bar is incredibly low there, and Lemmy seems fine)
> I find Lemmy frustrating to use
Well others don't, and that is fine. For me personally: not everyone needs to migrate to Lemmy (or another federated alternative), only the communities I care about. And the same can be true for other people as well.
Take a step back. What is social media achieving in its current state. If you only look at the shiny cat videos and dances and memes, that's not the purpose. The purpose is the mass collection of data.
If your only standard of "is working" is "it's what the majority uses", then yes, "it works". But do you really want that to be your standard? Just number of users, at any cost?
If you're competing against algorithms fine tuned to make people pretty much addicted, do you really want to play the same game? And is this mindset not fueled by ideology as well?
Of course, I doubt we could create email today, if it didn't already exist.
This is the biggest source of friction for Lemmy and the Fediverse. Non-tech savvy folks will not make the shift if it is such a pain to find the communities you want to join.
I’m hoping Lemmy has a cross posting function that will serve a similar use case. You start in a woodworking forum here and someone reveals the DIWhy forum to you organically. After six to twelve months you have your hands full.
Other than the "not a lot is happening there now", but there's some activity.
The most recent posts on the server I'm on:
The Lower Decks crossover to live action in Strange New Worlds
Star Trek Discovery Canceled
‘Galaxy Quest’ TV Series in Early Development at Paramount+
Jack Crusher is how old?
Star Trek The Lower Decks S03E09 was everything I wanted.
(spam - into the kill file that poster went)
TOS Film marathon
(crossposted trolling - more kill file material)
Captain Burnham mob/cops/big city episodes (Star Trek Discovery)
(crossposted trolling - figured out how to do more complicated rules - "cross posted to more than 3 groups and newsgroups match \.politics\." with this reader)
(crossposted trolling - even more kill file material)
Ode to Spot. (this post is from 2012)
When will the new Star Trek merge with the Twilight movies? (this post is from (2011)
Just text content.
edit: and as I write this, a new post just showed up in the past 2 minutes about Strange New Words S02E01.
So make of that what you will.
There are already 3D printing communities on Lemmy.
Lemmy as a user interface is not well designed. It wasn't made to be read on a web browser in a monitor. It was made to be read on a small smartphone screen.
Say "no new posts here, go there." Enforce that for one day and see what happens.
The core problem with the migration is that the information on where to go EXACTLY is hosted on the platform being boycotted. I decided to not visit Reddit anymore and watch for instances to pop up on the fediverse. If others do the same, the migration will be slow. Don't be discouraged if it takes a few days to pick up steam. There's another 3DPrinting magazine that has some users already. https://kbin.social/m/3dprinting@lemmy.world or https://lemmy.world/c/3dprinting
That leads to the second problem of on-boarding migrating users to a highly distributed platform. I've mentioned in the boycott server the need for "racks" (the subjects within instances are called magazines, this would be a collection). These would be moderated aggregators of instances, like the invisible step between lots of disparate subreddits. There would be no limit of the number of racks, so technically you could have a permutation of every associated magazine-instance combination. The purpose would be to have a single link new users can click on to get subscribed to a set of magazines all at once, basically making the federation concept seamless to less technical users while still highly flexible on the backend. I'm going to shoot the suggestion up the chain for kbin.
We want to avoid leaving folks like this: https://lemmy.world/post/97417
That leads to the third problem, which is all these alternatives are new and going through growing pains. Trying to add features comes second to keeping the service stable. I'm hoping others with more coding experience can assist kbin devs.
And I wanted to mention that last I heard (and saw evidence of), some of the main Lemmy devs were kinda garbage people (Tiananmen Square massacre supporters, not just questionable opinions on government). The more controversial instances have been defederated from the primary/intake server, but it's still worth mentioning. Kbin doesn't have that baggage, but there are only a couple devs, and really only one main dev, last I heard.
Kbin users can see and respond to Lemmy and Mastodon instances that are federated, so it has been the migration choice for most of the Reddit boycott groups.
edit: btw - I just looked at the comments on the one post. If you want to run a poll, fine, but most of the people protesting won't be there to vote. I thought the 3D printing subs were largely positive and supporting, if those comments represent the community I was supporting, I now have zero qualms about deleting my comments on Reddit.
It’s possible that google is overtrained, that it got too good at finding things in the structures of the Internet (see: PageRank), and that structure collapsed because we have Google for that now, so why bother? And then Google couldn’t tell the Pulp from the Real, and SEO became far too powerful. I doubt that’s what happened, but I can’t rule it out.
In some of my hobbies, Co-ops are a powerful force for good (or at the very least, mediocrity++). These federations are just a fancy word for Co-op, IMO. If I can’t have Good, I’ll settle for mediocrity++ over mediocrity—-, which is the precipice we stand on with Reddit current events.
A poster came onto sh.itjust.works claiming responsibility for that. They described the very minor trolling they used to achieve it. They say they work for Reddit and are personally invested in proving that federation is impossible.
So hey, it's the internet, assume everything in that is a lie, but it shows that there's emotional resonance in the idea of preventing this shift.
There are a lot of malcontents and radicals in the lemmy sphere and many of them are very angry about the Reddit exodus invading their space. It will be a few months before these things settle out.
Reddit set such a high bar for API pricing that I think there’s plenty of room to support both front-end and back-end development as well as hosting for lemmy servers. We just need to work out a revenue-sharing model that gives everyone a piece of the pie.
Unrelated: is there a way to do `random search term site:reddit.com` for lemmy?
Once you've picked a server and signed up, you can access any community on any other server by just searching for the community url on your instance. If you subscribe, your instance will begin federating that community to your instance.
It's pretty well described here - https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/federation_get...
So far for me, I've noticed about half of my communities are instance local, and half are federated. The expectation I think is different communities in different instances will win and be the primary places for games, or technology, etc.
I think this is probably way harder/more annoying on lemmy, since if I have 1 user on abc.xyz, and I also browse and want to comment/upvote on qwerty.cxz and asdf.rocks
It does via websocket
I feel like that's a nice unorthodox way of making it not feel so viscerally "new and empty", which is usually what leads to a kind of inexplicable ick factor most people have when evaluating whether or not to join a community.
Technically speaking, this is mass copyright infringement, unless it happens to fall under fair use. Reddit wouldn't have standing (for content its admins didn't create), but every other user would. I can conceivably see a copyright suit being granted class action status, and Reddit (who does have a vested interest, even if they had no standing) bankrolling the whole thing.
I granted reddit the right to use my submitted content.
I never granted that to lemmy. Someone would sue, and they'd win.
there should be an aggregator for all of these instances: https://join-lemmy.org/instances
because my first instinct guess is, there's going to be huge overlap on submissions daily
there's only so much new news daily and a certain niche of people who read it/contribute
scattering them out to a bunch of obscure niche places probably doesn't help
there are even boring days on HackerNews. how many monthly active users does this site have roughly? 500k? 1m? way less?
The interface is not up to old.reddit standards but better than the modern reddit interface. I like that because there many servers, any popular topic will have a bunch of subs to choose from. Seems a bit sparse with subscriber numbers per community but if that grows, I could see it scratching the reddit itch...
This type of design, jargon, style, is just anathema to a non-technical audience.
They don't wanted federated whatever, they just want reddit without the problems.
It’s so obvious that I guess someone must have done it and I just haven’t heard about it yet.
It was pretty painless, though I haven't tried actually posting anything yet.
Then, I stopped watching the walking dead
fear and denial will drive them to build garden walls when they should be transforming to stay ahead of obsolescence. turning into tiktok is fad chasing and a means to end of times, destruction, and relegation to has been status. myspace and tumblr realized too latomethi/ng e, and their transformations were never positioned to restore former glory.
what i would like to see is federation separate itself into three components. identify, client, server. the identity system should be divorced from the other two components and allow me to sign into any server. (as much as typing this next sentence will lose some people, public blockchains are a good way to store identity, where different servers can collaborate to host a unified identity database.) anyone should be able to use any client with any server. adding servers to my client should be no harder than an rss subscription. my configuration, my subscriptions should be stored with my identity, (not in an instance) and instantly portable to new clients. having an identity protocol, many client vendors, and multiple standardized server implementations will create something long lasting and resilient. the firms who choose that path will be the leaders.
how could reddit monetize this? run an identity server, have a direct messaging path to customers. fracture and make many competing clients for different peoplebases and community types. some free, some not. build an open source server backend and go the redhat model, selling enterprise support to large firms that want to host a community, and sell development services to honor feature requests from those customers.
(i know the fediverse is close to a lot of this, but the way identity is tied to instance isnt something i see as ideal. a lack of nomadic identity / identity portability makes the fediverse as fragile as any other centralized site. the fediverse being grafted onto existing dns, and having identity owned by a specific downstream host is problematic. identity should be distributed above the dns layer, not below cnames. the same applies to communities not being able to push themselves to new instances in an .. instant. serving of data is too centralized, and a p2p cdn layer /ipfs would help. the instance and the client seem too closely tied together as well. the way i see the current instances is the opposite of portability. im sure there is a lot of fast moving development going on, and hope someone can correct me. top answer here is a bit of a dealbreaker https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/134oud8/are_there... and where a blockchain ecosystem could help.)
[reposted from the star trek thread, probably belongs in this one more]
I’ve been on Reddit since the digg migration and I’ve never felt the need for an app, old.reddit.com and Adblock works perfectly fine on the phone. Better than Reddit’s mobile site.
Maybe this issue only affects 0.1% of users, but those 0.1% of users do a lot for the site that depends on functionality that Reddit is unable or unwilling to provide.
It also seems as though a lot of moderators of larger subreddits are starting to see how little their users understand and appreciate the amount of work that goes into moderating a subreddit. When those mod tools are gone and their jobs get harder, they're going to get shat on even more than they already do by those users, because of the issue that those users said was just "a bunch of dorks with no lives getting worked up over nothing".
Curious to see how this all shakes out.
old.reddit.com may not be long for this world. i.reddit.com and reddit.com/.compact were both removed earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35283379
(The irony now of that top comment, "99.5% of my usage is through the iOS client Apollo"...)
This may be a case where certain people are more important than most people.
> looks from the outside like a bunch of dorks
It appears the "dorks" are the certain people who have been making Reddit work for most people.
What if I told you that Reddit is going to do away with 'old.reddit.com' next?
This is a fundamental issue with your analysis. Reddit mods are integral to the site’s operations, and they aren’t employees they can just order around.
It seems likely to me that the same factors that motivate Reddit to do away with high-quality, user-oriented third party frontends will also motivate it to do away with old.reddit.com and RSS.
I am really hoping the next Reddit is not some megacorp effort.
I think Reddit should be very worried. Federation works fine for a "forum-like" replacement that doesn't need to be super timely.
Yes, the federated replacement is currently half-baked. You're not going to pick up the unwashed masses this round.
However, more than a few technical sub-Reddits that have simply shut down and are not coming back. The technical users didn't care much for Reddit to begin with and don't mind putting in some elbow grease to permanently kick Reddit to the curb. Lots of technical people now suddenly know about Lemmy who didn't have any clue before.
I have no doubt that Reddit will win this round, but it's a Pyrrhic victory. A nice chunk of software development talent is now mobilized to build the thing to wipe them out.
To be fair, I don't think the CEO is actually wrong. The AI companies are absolutely free-riding on everybody and that needs to stop. However, the way it was done with the API was not kosher--I suspect had he just grandfathered everybody using the API prior to date <X>, everything would have been fine.
I have no skin in the game, and couldn't care less either way what happens to Reddit company, the subs, their third party apps, or the moderators.
Shameless plug, but that's been a focus of ours with the platform that I've been building (sociables.com). We are trying to create an all in one stop for people to create communities, and not just posts.
Here's an example of a community on the platform:
https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
Why not just do that? Sure, it's a lot of python, and probably full of security holes, but there are enough reddit users to fix that, and the risk that your reddit instance might be taken over by malicious people is lower than the risk that centralized reddit will (since it already has been...)
Anyway, each time I link to it, I get crickets in response. Not sure why.
It's a slow process that involves building up communities and trust to hit a critical mass.
Pure speculation, but I think Reddit will continue to decline, it'll just be a while longer before everyone migrates from it.
I don't think reddit needs to be replaced, but they need to change some things. All subreddits are replaceable, and so are mods so i don't see the point of this protest
There is Saidit https://www.saidit.net/ but it's not really a viable alternative.
Popular? No.
Viable? Yes.
Try https://zapad.nstr.no/ it’s my instance.
If even a handful of people would join I think that would be nice.
So for instance, using reddit terminology, if I subscribe to r/gardening on your instance, do I get the same thing as everyone else gets in r/gardening on all the instances you federate with?
I'm clear on federation in general but not how it works for link aggregation. I've been reddit-free for about a year now but I've been planning to check out Lemmy once the current wave dies down and I'm not contributing to load stress.
I will say that I haven't noticed a decline in quality of posts; not sure if that's due to a strong culture or strict moderation. I suppose most of the Reddit refugees only browse the HN homepage, so HN veterans still have an out sized impact on the New page, which in turn dictates what can reach the top.
Sorry, but digg died because they told their community in unmistakable terms (aka v4) that they don't matter. Reddit happened to be there to take the refugees.
I think even casual users understand this perfectly well. They don't use 3rd party apps for browsing Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Tiktok (because those services also don't offer APIs). Why should Reddit be different?
I think the cause is totally fine. I think framing it as some social justice cause is incorrect though. People really liked a thing and now reddit is taking it away in the name of money. The most downvoted post of all time on reddit is an EA post responding to monetization concerns in a star wars game. Seems right in line to me.
A Reddit alternative is something every developer on here thinks they can crank out in a weekend and surely countless of them are actually trying that right now. But the reality is that reddit is a mess and nobody in their right mind wants to try to run a site like that.
Yes, this is exactly the same as the Netflix account sharing controversy. People who aren’t generating the company any profit are shouting the loudest. I don’t think there’s much of a loss here.
The era of free money was always going to end and now it’s over.
That said, the Reddit Web Frontend is not exactly the best. I've used - and paid - for a native Reddit client actually (Stellar). The app will be sunsetted though.
I deleted my account this week, being a monetizable person who is quite bothered.
The Reddit users that are bothered by this also include mods that use third-party tools for moderation activities. If those users leave, or are no longer about to function, that has potential long-term consequences for Reddit.
It will be interesting to see how things play out over time.
Edit: is interesting to note the knee jerk negative reaction to this comment. I don't think it contains anything controversial and is a simple statement of reality
I don't know why it took this long for moderators to quit.
1. Popcorn subreddits — r/pics, r/funny , r/twitterScreenshots
2. hobby & employment related
During my time modding, I viewed the subreddit I ran as being very thoroughly in the second group. All the users shared an interest in a particular game. Myself and all the other mods were people that enjoyed the game first and foremost. We did not accept any moderator applications from users that were the prototypical Reddit mods and no one ever went on to join other mod teams.
And I will say, it was honestly extremely fun. I got to build moderator tooling through the API that was interesting and had immediate real world use. Reddit moderation was the catalyst for becoming a developer myself and directly lead to my current career.
I met a diverse group of people from across the globe and formed many lasting friendships with people I would have never met otherwise. Beyond that, it also gave me opportunities to learn more about video game production, go on studio tours, meet game developers, and have experiences that few others ever will.
The mods on the team were not naive. We understood we were providing an extremely valuable service to both Reddit and the game developer for free— but for us, it was a mostly straight forward hobby that presented interesting logistical challenges. For years now, the status quo has been that Reddit may be making some obnoxious UX choices, but none of them had any actual affect on the moderator experience. Most mods were insulated from the changes because we used third party apps and old.Reddit.
I think it is deeply unfortunate that Reddit moderation does attract some of the worst internet users and many people have very negative experiences and opinions when it comes to mods —but for some corners of the site, Reddit moderation was a genuinely enjoyable hobby shared with like minded friends.
I was a mod for a while with /r/AskEngineers. It was never really that big of a subreddit, slowing crossing over 50K subscribers during my time there. And while small, we got to deal with all the usual issues any subreddit sees. In our case, it was conspiracy theorists "just asking questions" about the WTC tower collapse, school students asking people to do their school assignments for them, and stuff like that.
In my time moderating /r/aiclass, I also got the experience of interacting with someone with a genuine mental illness. :-/
I didn't become a mod to win Internet points or for some kind of social status. I was just there to facilitate good conversation between engineers, so that we can help each other. I didn't mind the labor involved, and I just wanted to promote engineering as a discipline.
There was just one active mod when I joined, and he started building up a good (if small) team. That continued through the years as people came and left, and we had a good crew when I resigned. I won't do it again anytime soon (maybe after I retire, who knows), but it was definitely worthwhile, and I hope I was able to make a difference for people.
Also the "power" users would probably be happy to pay reasonable prices to interact with it via app/api, so go ahead and charge something REASONABLE.
There's something nefarious going on behind the scenes and it's all very suspicious. I'm happy to go back to targeted forums if I need to.
They like the power of being a moderator and smacking down people who break the rules. Usually they also like to bend the rules themselves to push a personal agenda, promoting what they like and squashing what they don’t like.
It’s the same motivation people have to serve on HOA boards or elected government positions.
As the creator and moderator of a 100k sub these are the last things on my mind - and same for the other moderators. The whole point of creating and moderating that was because 13 years ago I thought it was the best place to build a community that I wanted to exist.
I have no idea if that's true for the moderators for /pics or whatever massive sub-reddits are, but I do know that for a lot, and especially the long tail subs and the folks I see in the /modcoord sub and discord, moderators are people who are interested in maintaining a community because they are interested in the affinity.
I know that when I've taken on unpaid positions of responsibility (not as a reddit mod but within my hobbyist community), it's because I cared about the organization and the people in it, and getting things right.
There are definitely power-trippers who are attracted to these roles. But there are also people who just want to facilitate a nice community and enjoy their little corner of the internet while making it enjoyable for others.
I think people who accuse mods of "just being on a power-trip" are the same people who get mad when their HOA tells them they have to trim the hedges so their neighbor can back out of their driveway safely.
It's myopic and doesn't give mods credit for seeing the bigger picture. This website, for example, is heavily moderated to keep protecting the feeling of "Reddit in the early days." If the mods here weren't on top of that, this place would be overrun by the type of stuff that is now on Reddit's front page.
The same reason you'd be a moderator for a non-profit, which is power.
With these changes not everyone is winning anymore.
I feel for moderators who have had to deal with crappy tools for so long and have had to rely on the API to get things done. I do question what Reddit has done with the VC money and the dev time they have put in. Their app is undeniably worse than the 3rd party alternatives, and the lack of decent mod tools that required the use of bots is something they should have sorted out YEARS ago. The lack of accessibility from their own app is also very questionable, and their response was to only allow not-for-profit accessibility tools to continue using the API for free. They should have addressed their shortcomings instead of features that have questionable utility, like real-time chat.
It's been known for ever, do prople think these guys just shit money? And the "sensitive" content deletes itself?
This is the sole, minuscule bit of power that most mods have in their lives. It’s sad.
What's going on? What's the bigger trend that's causing all these platforms to go so user-hostile?
The economy has changed and now they actually have to try to make money.
These companies need/want to start making money. Either due to investors wanting a return on their investment (Reddit IPO, Amazon buying Twitch), or poor decisions which have lead to lots of debt (Elon buying Twitter). Companies can't get free/cheap loans any more since interest rates are high.
Many of these social media companies all followed the tried-and-true "embrace, extend, extinguish" methodology... Offer a free/cheap product until you gain the network effect that kills your competitors, then crank up the prices to turn a profit.
economy has changed to where money is harder to get, and investors are probably much more skeptical now. and in order to get profitable, they have to start some user-hostile practices.
No, the __mods__ of __some__ of the biggest Reddit communities are in rebellion. Of the top 20 subreddits by subscribers, only 6 are currently closed. For the most part, the users of those subreddits dgaf about this issue, and even if the mods hold these subreddits hostage forever, the users will just move on to some similar subreddit that will take its place. The only loss here will be in smaller subreddits where some mod takes their toys home and nobody cares enough to start up something similar, and in that case, it's honestly not a big loss to reddit.
VC money is drying up and these companies need to turn a profit now finally
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/reddit-blackout-date-end-...
Just check r/India r/Mumbai r/Banglore r/Delhi r/Pune and other India subreddits and you will see.
Those dudes are legitimately insane
If the link is changed, it would be better to do it to an archive version. Here's one: https://archive.is/NcsuT
Any subreddits which had not been private previously will revert back to public and the ability to change from public to private will be temporarily disabled.
It's one thing for management to wait out 48h (doable), it's another thing to wait out something "indefinite".
Even if reddit forces subreddit's public, the auto-mod script to remove all new comments and posts is 2 lines of YAML. Having a public site with a bunch of upset and unaccountable mods is only inviting them to become bad actors and actively sabotage the site, which will do much much more damage than going private
However, the people that do care are the ones that moderate and contribute the vast majority of the content that the larger group enjoys.
I am pessimistic that the minority here will win out in the end, but the majority may begin to lose interest if the quality of new content drops.
At least for myself, the blackout gave me enough space away from the site to consider if my time on Reddit was valuable/enjoyable and basically I concluded it is not worth the time. I’ve uninstalled the app and I haven’t really missed a thing.
I agree. These protests have missed the point. There is a (very) loud minority raising hell right now, but spez is right, it's just noise. The silent majority is still hanging around.
If I were them, I would rush to add some reddit features to Facebook group (reddit-like threads, upvotes/downvotes) or try to launch something new that’s more like reddit on top of the facebook/insta social graph.
Just call it “Groups”
why you guys think they're doing the unique usernames? because reddit with non-unique usernames would suck.
everyone has been talking about how much discord is a blackhole for content and it's unsearchable etc. And that's really fine for the chat side of things, but people hammering it into being a wiki/documentation/etc is a sign that there's a product need not being met. Discord almost certainly knows this, but, non-unique usernames for a global community doesn't work.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/15/instagram-is-rolling-out-i...
I don't really want my group activity to be linked to my Facebook identity for tracking/advertising purposes.
Are you serious? That is the most useful and well done function of Facebook! The accounts are all mostly real names so there is much less toxicity. Instead you get enthusiasts around a topic that can discuss issues in a constructive manner - or at least more constructive than Reddit.
Yet, addicted me still occasionally opens reddit. And all the content I see is from communities that did not black out, or returned, so all the content is from communities that at least a part of my says I shouldn't want to see.
Kinda kills the fun.
It's made me wonder why I've spent time shoveling engagement and words into the maw of a machine that didn't turn out to be the people I thought I was hanging out with. I spent a YEAR of my life traveling great distances to pursue a long-distance relationship I literally found on Reddit. That relationship turned out to not be as healthy as I wanted to believe it was…
…same with Reddit. More's the pity.
Not because I actively were using reddit but because all my search queries (not all of them with "reddit") went to one or another reddit post with the information not available anymore.
Even if reddit decides to comply, we have to change this for a better internet in the future.
Go lemmy guys.
Here at least there’s a chance Reddit will unblock the subs if this goes on too long.
https://gist.github.com/hanniabu/6f96c6e820d58d8736f3c15d4c0...
There's also some notes above the linked table
I'm so sick of the smug ones, the people saying the protest is useless, the completely missing-the-point statement that most users don't care, and the near gleeful self abuse of people mocking others that don't want to keep using a proprietary platform being sold to china by a liar.
I'm done with Reddit threads on HN. I recommend folks interested in federated networks move these conversations there and let the rest enjoy reddit as it turns into digg.
r/politics
r/worldnews
r/movies
r/tech
r/television
r/news
r/technology
r/gadgets
r/sports
minor ones i've noticed:
r/indieheads
r/boxing
It's a pretty serious blackout, but it'd be even more serious if those went dark too (and stayed dark).
r/nba
r/nfl
r/formula1
r/mma
Those are some major ones still private.
Quite disappointing that r/soccer decided to re-open though. Would've made a significant impact.
The current options suck.
A proposal to address the failures of extant options:
Users hold their own data in the account they use for SSO
Every comment post etc is in your own account, with sites putting a request in the page from your SSO host
The front page is defined by your choice of site or SSO provider.
Eg I have a site and users can login with Google or make an account with my SSO provider, when they post a reference pointer is stored and the content is "reported" to the SSO provider by both the client and server with only those items reported by both being "validated" and stored. When site serves page with that content it puts in a js snippet that pulls the content item from the appropriate server.
This means users have full control over their content, sites don't have to host as much content, SSO services have better monetization options (Subs or Sales of Data Analysis) while sites don't lose thiers, etc
Subforums would just be different servers/sites, with your chosen frontend aggregating them all like a new age interactive RSS
What I DO care about is being able to browse without ads and recommendations I don't want shoved down my throat. They could have done things in a way that preserved 3rd party clients but required payment for an ad-free experience. People would be mostly fine with that I think.
There's also the other aspect of combining multiple forums into one cohesive website, which mostly isn't solvable by old school forum software. For that we need a federation scheme or even just old fashioned webrings to start with.
Large communities can't meaningfully migrate off it.
Small communities shouldn't migrate off it. (As they will lose discoverability.)
Just look at this poll for r/indiedev: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/149uqfc/rindiedev...
Majority of votes want it closed down, and basically all comments want to keep it open.
You don't have to be a community member to vote, so this can mean only 1 thing: users from outside of r/indiedev are voting to close it.
edit: if you downvote, please solve the mystery of the disconnect between votes and comments.
Vs if you want the sub to stay open and are against the shutdown, your position is not obvious, and has value in explaining why you are against it.
But sure, keep dismissing it, enjoy not being able to google stuff I guess.
We could really use that right now.
I'll say it again, this is the equivalent of a change.org petition.
Unless all of say the top 10 (maybe more) subreddits completely, indefinitely went private - this will do nothing. There's not enough weight to it.
And even then, Reddit could just wait it out. People who really want X subreddit will just make a new one with a similar name. That happens regardless on almost a daily basis. Most of the major subreddits have a half-dozen alts.
As for alternatives to Reddit as a site, that's not going anywhere fast. What makes Reddit Reddit is not the tech, it's the content. Alternatives can exist that seem nearly as good on paper, but unless a sizable number of users go there, it means nothing.
And most users do not care about this API situation. It's a very vocal, very small minority.
Reading between the lines: Reddit is charging money for 3rd-party integration. The Reddit community has interpreted this as greedy (or, more specifically: the mods community has interpreted this as "We will have to start paying money to use services that are necessary for us to mod our subreddits"). But Reddit has not backed down. What if they can't? What if the problem is that the cost to provide the bulk-data API accesses is starting to add up for Reddit itself?
If so, then the problem is hosting Reddit has become too expensive and one solution is, indeed, to make it cheaper by having fewer high-traffic subreddits.
Live streaming, chat, avatars and NFTs are all features that should never have been built.
You sign up to the read-only instance and can see the entire fediverse's contents and posts and when/if you wanted to comment, the app would let you know that you had to sign up to the instance the comment came from to post your own comment and take you that instance's sign-up page.
One of the biggest turn-offs for me was finding which ones to join and/or had content I was or might be interested in.
Haven't seen a decent sized one for r/NFL though
Point people to an alternative. Not just in the vague direction of The Lemmiverse or Squabbles or whatever; if your sub is going dark, you should have somewhere to receive all your refugees.
Even better if the mods coordinate so that all subs are pointing to the same place(s).
Even a shared Discord would have been a big step up imo.
This protest was just gone about the wrong way.
and removing those mods would/could/should be perceived as an escalation in this fight that could make the problem worse not better
The correct thing to do was to do a weekly blackout or similar. This would have affected the bottom line and hurt the experience of the website.
Instead, you are asking people to change their routines permanently. They will adjust.
Truth is, 99% of the user base doesn't care and hates the mods anyhow.
i see the arguments and i wonder why the way to protest is not to just stop participating, rather than taking down the subreddit. if moderation is hard without the third-party apps, stop doing it?
to my understanding, the mods want to preserve their powers and the subreddits' integrity. so prolonging the blackout does not seem much more effective to me than the initial publicity in tech media. especially if people running the site understand the above point.
If people blackout subreddits and Reddit continues to chug along nicely with ad revenue isn’t it just proving that Reddit doesn’t need the users who are upset?
By the way, which Lemmy instance is the HN crowd gravitating towards? Programming.dev?
That said, I could really give a crap if any of these sites goes away. I'm only here for the articles, and these sites aren't generating them, they're just linking them.
End of the day, reddit is going to have to figure out how many users are willing to boycott. Moderators are one thing. They are a minority. But if they remove the ability for /r/funny to be private, would users honor the protest?
The subs that have ended their blackouts are going on like nothing happened.
I know that Google search has gotten so bad in the last couple years that I normally have to add "reddit" to the search terms to get a good result.
If it was ChatGPT they could just manually approve api use for the few popular clients
Reddit really needs to stop this.