This is a rant post and I apologize but I had to talk about this. Most subs are coming back online and not saying ANYTHING about the next steps. Only a handful of subs are going indefinite. I checked the front page for the first time today after leaving the a couple hours before the day of the blackout and what do I see? Subs are up, and comments and upvotes are up to the general average before the blackout.
I checked r/gaming to see their recent post (WHICH HAS OVER 68k UPVOTES), and I see a comment with over 500 upvotes saying in a nutshell, “You guys need to calm down, they’re a company and need to make money”.
Along with a couple other comments saying similar things. Are you fucking serious? You can’t even have the fucking balls to say, “This is a company that has consistently screwed over its users and I need to take a stand and quit my addiction”? You’re just gonna sit and do nothing? Fuck you. You’re no fucking better than u/spez. You’re all a bunch of fucking hypocritical liars for shitting on spez and the admins while talking about how you’re “done” with Reddit and you won’t support this.
Go touch grass you fucking addicted cowards. I’m glad I made the switch to Lemmy if it means I don’t have to interact with dumbfucks like you.
Reddit isn’t going to die overnight. It will probably not die at all (at least not as a result of this latest stupidity). And that shouldn’t be anyone’s goal here, anyways. The goal should be to fracture the monopoly. Let the dregs stay on Reddit. And that’s not me calling every redditor at the moment a dreg. I mean allow it to devolve into that, just like how Twitter is devolving into nothing but twits.
Trust me, reddit remaining alive is good for the fediverse. Let it become an echo chamber that helps contain the kind of person no one needs over here. This is going to be a slow process. The fact that this site is already functional is a really good sign that the process is going to work. Don’t rush it, just sit back and let it happen.
The fediverse will remain alive as long as there are developers maintaining it and sysadmins hosting it. My code is shit but my hardware isn’t going anywhere.
I don’t necessarily want reddit to die, or even see its user base devolve into dregs. I view competition as a positive. Lemmy and the broader fediverse is competition for reddit and vice versa. Both existing and thriving may make each better over time.
Perhaps one reason we got to this point is that reddit has control over the market on this format, or at least has the dominant network effect. Many seem view this as a zero-sum game, where for one player to advance another must fall away, but I find that perspective short-sighted.
I respect (and share, to a certain extent) the opinions and frustrations of recent defectors, but urge everyone to take a long-term view.
I understand where you’re coming from here. I think the reason some hold the view you mention is because at least in the years leading up to online spaces becoming consolidated, that is sort of how it went. You’d have one major site get overcome by another and another until we got to this recent weird period of stabilized stagnation, as communities and people converged on the same few spaces & apps.
Now very gradually we’re seeing some small but growing efforts to break out of this stagnation. Some are going back to smaller, more carefully curated, moderated, and isolated communities apart from the masses (e.g. tildes, cohost, pillowfort, etc.), and others trying something a little different, similar to those smaller communities yet connected to each other (where we’re discussing this).
You’re right that historically there has been one dominant player at a time, and that it is typically in a period of stagnation or complacency when something new comes along to initiate the shift to the next player.
Social networks are great examples of natural monopolies, largely due to the aforementioned network effect. Without a large, diverse user base they tend to become echo chambers.
But you helpfully point out that there are other new players in the market, to the point that a successful reddit may not be necessary to spur competition for the next great thing.
I’m under the impression that over time, isolated social media sites may all fall victim to the same patterns. It’s not so much that I want reddit to fail, it’s that I see it as doomed to eventually fail. The whole fediverse things seems like a game-changer for the internet and free speech.
I agree that’s a plausible scenario, and maybe even most likely given the pattern of history. And I understand and appreciate that you’re not hoping or advocating for that outcome, but highlighting its likelihood.
I also agree with your sentiment that the fediverse seems like a game-changer, particularly in the area of free speech.
Decentralization -> centralization -> corporatization -> enshittification
The federation will fall victim to that too, eventually. But hopefully by then we’ll have something else we can turn to.
I could be wrong since I’m still new to this, but the federation is an amorphous blob that could theoretically continue to avoid centralization. This should be the aim, and honestly this aim should probably be kept lowkey because that could hasten something like “SOPA 2024: This is why we can’t have nice things.”
The way I envision it happening is
Either a company creates an instance, or an existing instance needs to start introducing ads to pay for server maintenance. Either way, the concept of profit is introduced.
Instance starts explicitly trying to draw users to them for the purpose of ad revenue
Ad instance becomes large with a ton of content
Ad instance starts selectively defederating with smaller, independent communities. Probably citing “trolls” and “hate speech”, because who wants to be federated with an instance that has trolls and hate speech?
Ad instance introduces a “trusted federation” model, again (wink wink) to combat “trolls” from other instances (conveniently, instances that are not run by corpos and filled with ads)
Eventually there is one big instance with a ton of content (and ads, and doomscrolling, and lootboxes, and other tricks to keep people going back) and a bunch of smaller independent instances that aren’t allowed to federate with the big one
Either laws get passed or ISPs crack down or server hosters begin to deny server space to smaller servers…again, the easiest way to get this to happen is to start crying about “trolls” and “hate speech” and “pedophilia” and anything else they can convince the majority is lurking around on these smaller instances
Instances that aren’t part of the “trusted federation” model get legislated or policied into non-existence
Centralized Fediverse.
This is the part where the scenario breaks down, IMO. Some of the biggest and most litigious companies on Earth aren’t able to stop torrent sites from being hosted, how would “laws get passed” to prevent independent Fediverse servers? Why isn’t Reddit doing that right now, given that it’s basically the “single large server” you’re describing here?
It’s already happening. SESTA / FOSTA for example.
Those were passed in 2018. They don’t seem to have had much effect on Reddit in the past five years, and don’t seem to be particularly broad in their applicability to online fora in general.
How exactly does the instance with ads become large enough to set terms and defederate other instances out of existence?
People don’t really prefer ads. They can just use federated instances to access any content without seeing ads. The communities themselves can join another ad free instance.
Historically, using vc money to grow without ads. Plus selling user data. Once they’re big enough, they ramp up the ads.
They will probably be defederated when they start getting VC money. They may try to hide it but if the money is supposed to help them dominate it will be difficult to do.
Let’s say they have the money. How are they going to use it to dominate?
Just having better hardware? That would only be attractive if the rest of lemmy cannot handle the traffic. In that case lemmy would be doomed anyways. Paying people to post stuff and drive activity? People will talk and the whole business case is you don’t pay for content, users provide it for free. Same arguments apply for hired moderators. Forking the software? Major changes and features without any willingness to contribute back to the project will get them defederated, especially when VC backing becomes know.
I expect reddit will be like facebook in the long run. Facebook is still useful for specific things (marketplace, messenger), but otherwise it’s just a bloated zombie hippo now. Still massive and still moving, but definitely bleeding out lol.
We’ll have to wait and see how July goes, after all the third parties get killed. In the meantime, the fediverse needs to become as high quality as possible, 'cause a bunch of people are gonna be deciding between a increasingly poor experience (reddit), and a fairly steep learning curve for non-tech people (fediverse/instances/threads/posts/boosts/favourites/reduce/magazines/microblogs/communities).
Big agree on this. Look at Digg, it stayed operational as a social media site until 2018! Let’s hope not for Reddit’s immediate demise, but its slow descent into obscurity.
Digg took several years to decline into irrelevance. The first blow was the HD-DVD key kerfuffle, where admins were banning users left and right. That’s when I made my reddit account, as did many others. After the dust settled at Digg, it was another year plus before they changed things up to benefit power posters and essentially bury everyone else. I think it was another year or two before they did the thing where they removed all commenting, which was the last nail.
What was the HD-DVD thing? I was on reddit so I saw all the digg users come in but I was never really clear on the events leading up to the exodus.
HD-DVD encryption crack was published on Digg, and censored. Digg community got creative and kept exercising free speech (mugs with the encryption key on it and other types of posts with the encryption key somehow embedded in the content of the posts). https://yro.slashdot.org/story/07/05/02/0235228/diggcom-attempts-to-suppress-hd-dvd-revolt This old article from Slashdot sums it up, while the comments have a lot in common with the current Reddit controversy. History is repeating itself…
The HD-DVD event was some true internet history.
Don’t forget DivX.
That would be lovely wouldn’t it? Watch it go public only to slowly lose value over years and never come back? I would love to see Wall Street bets betting against it. Now that I’ve found so many excellent alternatives I’m more than happy to watch it dwindle away to nothing in the fullness of time.
Doesn’t that result in the general public owning shares that gradually decrease in value while the current owners make money at the current value? Seems like index funds will be paying for it unless the actual amount the Reddit owners sell it for goes down before the sale.
Satisfying I guess, but frustrating that the people that did the damage get a payout while the public holds the bag while it deflates.
Your are right but thats the same as in many other IPOS. If you buy shares from a company you have to inform yourself where you spend your money.
Yeah, it’d just be nice if it lost all that value before going public and ended up a loss for the VCs instead of retirees.
Can you give examples of the alternatives? My daily habit of trying to load reddit (and closing it now) needs something else
Removed by mod
I’ve seen a couple similar comments like this. Is this some joke I’m not “in” on or are you types just idiots?
Just trolls. We’ve got one mod, who is also the dev. So moderation is gonna be… not great for a while. Nothing against our mod/dev, it’s just gone from a one-man-job to needs-a-team overnight. And even a properly sized team will need a while to develop tools.
I worry that now beehaw is defederating from lemmy, the trolls who were on lemmy are coming to kbin so they can continue to mess with beehaw. This is the first real troll I’ve seen from kbin, and he joined an hour ago.
My goal is to not give a shit and move on. I don’t care what they do. If people want a shitty experience and pay for it with their privacy then let them.
Yes this is exactly what happened with the freenode -> libera split. Although we entirely lost some good people and the community was smaller, the reduction in toxicity made it all worthwhile. The type of people who defend reddit on this are not the type of people we want anyway.
This is the first real chance we’ve had to break the chains on corporate social media. We should all strive to make this work for the betterment of everyone in the longer term.
Much the same happened with the Slashdot -> soylent split but the community was already so small by then it had no chance of thriving. We don’t need a huge chunk of reddit to survive and thrive though.
kBin would’ve been my preference over Reddit even before this because of the difference in UI and community. This place definitely feels more comfortable.
my exact thoughts, I think i’m going to start using this a lot more