Quote from the post:
Hello everyone, I’ll try to keep this short as I know there’s been a lot going on over the last few days. When we made our announcement last week, we intended to get Reddit’s attention on a subject that our team found extremely concerning. /r/Videos is joining a larger coordinated protest and signing an open letter to the admins found here.
The announcement was of exceedingly high API prices which we all know was to intentionally kill 3rd party applications on reddit (Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Boost, Relay, etc.) Since that post several things have become clear; Reddit is not willing to listen to its users or the mod teams from many of its largest communities on this matter. Yesterday all major third-party Reddit apps announced that they would be shutting down on the 30th of June due to these changes. There were no negotiations and Reddit refused to extend the deadlines. The rug was pulled out from under them and by extension all of the users who rely on those tools to use reddit.
In addition to this, the AMA hosted by Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, which was intended to alleviate concerns held by many users about these issues, was nothing short of a collage of inappropriate responses. There are many things to take away from this AMA but here are the key points. Most disappointingly it appears that Reddit outright misconstrued the actions of Apollo’s creator /u/iamthatis by saying that he threatened Reddit and leaked private phone calls, something done only to clear his name of another accusation.
So what’s happening? The TL;DR? Effective tomorrow (6/11/2023), /r/Videos will be restricting posting capabilities. Anything posted before the cut off date will likely be the final front page of our community before we go private indefinitely. In the unlikely scenario that Reddit ownership has a sudden change of heart and capitulates on their decisions we will reopen, but until that happens /r/Videos will stay closed. Many other communities have come to similar decisions and we support those who have decided to take a stand.
An indefinite shutdown would not work - the moderators of the subs who perform them will be kicked out and be replaced by people who want to keep the subs in operation. Plus, it’s a disservice to people who do use Reddit as a resource for work or otherwise. I think a 48 hour protest is reasonable, but beyond that, there’s not a whole lot you can do.
While true, between this and the Twitter fallout I’m hoping more people are seeing the folly of making dependencies of centralised services that they do not own and have zero sway over management decisions of.
There were many people pleading with folk to stay on Twitter because of the communities they had built or the activist work they had been achieving… but that was all built on a house of cards.
Now is the time to do the work to shift away from depending on platforms that don’t care about their users real needs & embrace a better way of being!
I appreciate I’m likely preaching to the choir here 😂
Decentralized is the future of the internet
Decentralised is also its past.
With some luck the “web 2.0” fad of siloed services will end up being a weird blip in it’s history!
Yeah but it amazes me how many people just don’t get it. People on reddit looking for an alternative… “let’s go to lemmy”, “nah there’s lefty weirdos”, “ok let’s go to <closed source reddit clone>”, “ok this is gonna work out great!”
I’ve been trying to constantly educate others about the importance of shifting to de-centralized platforms. That’s the conversation that needs to be happing. Both online and IRL.
I’m new to Lemmy but started using Mastodon 3 years ago. Been exciting to see it explode since the enshitification of Twitter and really hoping to see the same thing here.
I run a site for owners of a very specific model of RV, of which they only made less than 2,000, and who knows how many are still on the road (they ended production in 2000).
There’s also a Facebook group. The Facebook group is good for general conversation - hey, I’ll be in Colorado, anyone near there? - but for technical issues, it’s frustrating, because if someone does answer the question, it’s difficult to find in the future. And Facebook’s algorithms mean that the topics aren’t presented in time order or anything like that, so you can easily miss a post that has something important to you but isn’t a major discussion topic.
And then, it’s all controlled by a company, so if Facebook decides to clean up old stuff tomorrow, there’s nothing we can do. “But it’s so hard to use the forum!” because I have self registration turned off and you have to email me for an account (spammers). Meanwhile the Facebook group gets t-shirt spammers about twice a month.
It drives me nuts.
Lemmy and personal forums have a similar issue though. Just like users were previously at the whim of the large company to provide service, now they rely on you. What if you were to get board of running the forum or (however terrible) something were to happen to you?
Now the site and all of it’s content is lost for the users permanently. Lemmy instances also have this problem. They rely entirely on a single administrator, (or small group of them). In the Web1.0 days this wasn’t such a large issue, because websites were most often read-only for content consumption and web forums were small and populated by niche tech savvy people. These days however, the users create a lot of the content that is hosted and they naturally expect it to persist.
Lemmy needs some way of allowing users to port their profile and content from one instance to another, and a redundancy system where instances can partner with others to host data for redundancy purposes, or something to that effect. Maybe users pay a small hosting fee for their own content and it’s not tied to an instance? Though I’m not sure how that would work, I’m just spitballing.
There’s a lot of problems to solve, and this fediverse is a very interesting idea, but it’s not perfect and introduces a lot of questions. I don’t want perfect to be the enemy of good, but I’m not sure entrusting the longevity of the content to admins of a particular server is the best plan.
You’re correct, though my forum could be archived on the Internet archive (I’m not sure if it is, but it could be).
I agree with your general point though, there are still single points of failure in Lemmy.
To some degree, you’re right, reddit probably won’t change regardless of what mods do. If they really are feeling the blackout, as you’d say they’ll probably just replace the moderators and open the community back up, rather than reverse their decision.
However, I feel like it’s reddit doing the disservice to their users, not mods who are taking action by protesting. Ultimately, and if reddit do replace the mods and try and continue as normal, then it sends a stronger message to the community that reddit doesn’t care about or respect them and it’s not a not a good place to continue being.
In the dynamic between reddit the company running the site and the users, there is limited power users have against reddit which holds a lot of power, but protesting like what’s happening now one of the main tools users have.
If neither option will work then take whatever option causes your opponent the most trouble. I very much doubt they want to shake up moderation on thousands of subreddits overnight.
I’m also dubious of how possible it is to replace moderators outright. These are all individual communities with at least somewhat separate tools of moderation let alone unique practices that have made the community what it is. Does videos still feel like videos with an entire different moderation team? Maybe, but I bet the niche crochet community won’t.
Yeah reddit is full of “small” communities that are actually like thousands or tens of thousands of people. Those will be the ones most impacted by this.