Software development is easier than ever, CPU power and bandwidth are quite cheap, and there are working federated structures like Mastodon.
There's no reason why Reddit couldn't be turned into a federated system as well, in fact it almost is one as it is. Eg, just like on Mastodon servers can choose whether to interact with each other, on Reddit it's not uncommon to get auto-banned from somewhere if you post in a subreddit they dislike.
Yeah but also no? The skills required to be a basic "full stack" developer have multiplied to the point where I think that term is on the verge of obsolesence just as "webmaster" was before it.
There is of course nothing stopping anybody from simply writing PHP like it's 2005 even though it's 2023, but going against the currents has its own set of costs.
> just like on Mastodon servers can choose whether to interact with each other, on Reddit it's not uncommon to get auto-banned from somewhere if you post in a subreddit they dislike.
That feels like a very incomplete implementation of federation, to say the least. Being able to defederate is one part of that, but "just make alts for the various mutually defederated subsets of subreddits" seems like a pretty unpractical way of going about it. :D
That's Reddit for you, the actual site doesn't really serve the needs of many of its users, so they had to invent workarounds like "run a bot that auto-bans people that post in r/placewehate".
But the actual dynamic of that to me seems to resemble what you get under federation. It's just that Reddit doesn't let people do it easily, so weird workarounds are needed.
huh, I guess seeing reddit like this makes some sense. kinda like Ankh-Morpork on the disk world: not free in any real sense, but free enough in practice for people to get done what they want done.
Not the bright future we had hoped for, but the one we built...
Software development is easier than ever, CPU power and bandwidth are quite cheap, and there are working federated structures like Mastodon.
There's no reason why Reddit couldn't be turned into a federated system as well, in fact it almost is one as it is. Eg, just like on Mastodon servers can choose whether to interact with each other, on Reddit it's not uncommon to get auto-banned from somewhere if you post in a subreddit they dislike.