Its beyond me why one would move away from Reddit due to changes in the API pricing making it hard (but not impossible) for 3rd party apps ... to discord, which is completely closed off and allows no 3rd party apps? Even worse, content on discord wont be visible on search engines.
[1] Reddit not building the needed tools for its free labor and relying on third parties to do it for them, then taking those tools away without providing another option
[2] Disrespecting moderators and powerusers by insulting them ("landed gentry"), creating incentives for them to scab on each other, and being threatening and doublehanded at every turn, if not outright lying.
[3] A decade of broken promises on feature development, trust n safety failures, half baked features that no one asked for that end up shut down.
[4] Breaking the illusion that users ever owned their data (posts, comments) and communities.
Not all these reasons apply to everyone, but at least one of them applies to most people protesting.
Reddit has built up so much bad will. They could have been a great steward of the internet (and made money doing it!), but instead they decided to attack their community of moderators (the same insult they hurl at moderators, saying they are attacking their community of users!)
Discord, for its faults, does not have the same issues.
> Discord, for its faults, does not have the same issues.
Yet. Reddit was a friend when Digg died. Any closed platform can do whatever they want whenever they want and as soon as they decide to start making money. I wouldn’t trust discord to not pull a Reddit in a few years.
This is a cycle we can expect for any platform that has the bills. Hosting is not free. Storage is not free. Bandwidth is not free. Labor to fix bugs and develop features is not free. So this constant expectation that it should all be free (or even cheap) is not a realistic world view. We joke about the fact that "the cloud" isn't real, it's just someone else's computer. But isn't that kinda the basis of the current delusion? "We want to have complete freedom, be completely safe, get the features we want, have it for free and... don't bother me with any advertisement".
I don't think any of the third part devs are asking for it to be free. The Apollo devs initial response to the announcement was "I'm honestly looking forward to the pricing and the stuff you're rolling out provided it's enough to keep me with a job. You guys seem nothing but reasonable, so I'm looking to finding out more." Then they announced pricing which is 29x the current revenue per user, and are blocking NSFW content from the API anyway.
>This is a cycle we can expect for any platform that has the bills.
I am not surprised to hear this sentiment so frequently in this startup minded space, but there is another approach to the problem.
IMO, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc are technically "simple" (once you strip them down to what the end user actually needs from the service) and they provide incredibly valuable services to the world (well I think Twitter is incredibly lame, but I guess I am alone in this opinion). Why aren't there non-profit (or benefit corporation) versions of these services?
Because the problem isn't technical, it's well, human. As it turns out, when we're given a slight bit of anonymity (in the "my name and face aren't attached to this" sense, not in the "no consistent identity" sense, aka "crypto won't solve this either"), the barrier to being an asshole becomes significantly lower[0].
Someone needs to moderate those spaces and Masnicks Theorem states that any form of content moderation at scale doesn't properly work[1] because nobody can agree on what "bad behavior" even is outside the blatantly obvious like automated spam. (And just to head this off - automated techniques like karma and "votes" sound great in theory but in practice enable all sorts of abuse. - the problem isn't technical and can't be technically solved.)
The problem is simply scale - there's plenty of niche communities for various interests who are likely to not fall victim to the process due to either being non-profit or existing perpendicular to a business' actual revenue stream[2]. Those communities will keep existing until they simply burn out (the natural lifecycle) and the last couple mods just quietly close the place down.
Twitter/Facebook/Reddit attempted to unnaturally cannabilize those communities by moving everything in their walled gardens (alongside a lucky break due to Tapatalk killing the ability for traditional forums to move to mobile) and then trying to extract money from them. Their state is honestly more unnatural than you'd think, but it's what most users gravitated towards.
The closest we have right now as a solution to marry the self-managed forums of old with centralized services is the fediverse, but explaining it to people is often considered to be difficult enough that it probably won't grab mainstream appeal.
And y'know... Maybe that's alright? Centralized social media that tries to appeal to everyone may just have been a mistake to begin with.
>Because the problem isn't technical, it's well, human.
I agree wholeheartedly. We are no longer at the point where the core end user services provided by FB/Reddit/Twitter require serious technical innovation. They require a massive amount of moderation though. And Reddit shows that there are volunteers out there who will do it for free, but they need to feel that they are valued and supported by the organization that runs the show.
What better org structure to support volunteers than a non-profit?
I mean, technically that's how most old-school forums operated in practice. You had one guy/girl who operated the entire thing, asked for maybe 100-200 bucks a year to keep the server lights on and the community would fund that and it'd stay in the air.
The main problem is that I don't think a non-profit could realistically meet the cost required to actually run a platform like this. It's really expensive to run a general purpose platform (not to mention difficult since Masnick's Impossibility Theorem), to the point where I'd call it almost inherently unsustainable. It can work easily for smaller communities, it just won't work for massive ones.
--
To give you an idea, I've been a mod on-and-off on several communities for the past decade (not Reddit, mostly small Discord servers for homebrew projects and a couple of IRC chats) - for the most part, "being a mod" just translates to "check recent userlog to ban obvious spam, tell people to stop butting heads constantly, be welcoming to the newbies". If you think being a mod is enjoying power... well you might have only reddit/discord mods (and their bloated mod teams) for reference. In practice, you're closer to a kindergarten teacher than to the "landed gentry". Usually doesn't take more than 10 minutes a day in experience, if the tooling you have is good enough.
The problem is... the communities I moderated only had 2-3k users in total at most, and only 30 or so were active at any one day. This is very much how smaller communities work (and should work) in practice. But... that doesn't even come close to the total userbase of something like Reddit, even less with platforms that don't at all segment their users like FB and Twitter. Those sites service millions of users each day and their larger communities have thousands of new posts to deal with every day. Reddit mostly mitigates it by splitting it up to volunteer mods who all control a smaller portion of that community, but with FB and Twitter it just... doesn't work since the platforms are opposed to such a notion by design since their entire selling point is "talk with everyone, everywhere, all at once".
Moderation on such a platform just cannot work unless you pour as much cash into it as FB/Twitter (used) to do and no non-profit comes even close to that degree of income (nor can you really obtain it without becoming as privacy-invasive as those two platforms are). Reddit completely gave up on global moderation if I understand it correctly and now only bans users for breaking the law or if they risk damaging the PR of the company.
Thank you for some interesting comments grounded in your experience.
I do, personally, think that now would be a good time for some form of non-profit/co-op/etc. reddit competitor to emerge. I've seen multiple suggestions in this direction, including from a GSU professor quoted in an MSM article. The demand is there - I think that most of the people aware and annoyed vis-a-vis the Reddit storm would coalesce easily enough around a properly structured alternative - set up clearly as a community-driven platform w/ an economic model strongly signaling commitment to that etc. And, I suspect the easiest way to do it is to form some reasonable organizational structure, and start with a version of the old reddit code base available through GitHub.
I've noticed projects springing up left-and-right to write new code bases, move in different directions, etc., but, seems like the lowest possible friction option (not 0, but low enough to be quite appealing for many potential users) would be throwing up a fork of the old code base (ideally, audited / security-improved out of the gate).
This seems fairly workable to me - you could even move back to the original model of not hosting images, video, etc. I suspect reddit inc. wouldn't be interested in going after such a service considering that their hands are full with trying to juice numbers for IPO and all of the constant foot-in-mouth disease drama out of Huffman et al. Etc.
But, I must write that, I haven't looked into this matter in any depth and may be way off base in some way or other - apologies if so.
Quick follow-up: just started seeing the name "tildes" pop up in the past week or so. One of the potential alternatives that's been mentioned. Then, saw an article yesterday that, to me, implied, that tildes has a very similar model to reddit.
Finally checked it out - this service, apparently set up in 2018 (!) has one of the types of structures that fits. In fact, the introductory blog post (https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes) seems ... "prophetic". Not so much in terms of stating anything many didn't know at the time, but, more in the sense of a sort of anachronism like: this sounds like it was probably written in the past two weeks.
So, FYI - "tildes.net" seems a very fitting low-friction (to move to) alternative that's already been running for multiple years and where more and more "reddit refugees" seem to be showing up.
> Why aren't there non-profit (or benefit corporation) versions of these services?
From a quick search, it seems that the operating costs for Meta in 2022 was USD $87.66 billion. Twitter was $5.6 billion in 2021. Reddit's is a mystery but it has 192 million more monthly active users than Twitter (not that they necessarily post the same amount of content or that the content is as expensive to store/serve, but in any case it's not going to be cheap either.)
So to run something like Facebook, you'd have to have one of the best-funded non-profits ever. Non-profit doesn't mean it has to be a charitable foundation (so you could run ads and sell services, which you'll need to, because you're not getting $87.66 billion through donations), but even non-profit companies with a decent amount of revenue do not come close to that amount. I don't think it's impossible to create an ethical, non-profit alternative to Facebook, but I understand why one hasn't been created (there are non-profit social networks, but most seem to be distributed/federated social networks, which are a very different experience for most users.)
Even if you created something with perfect feature-parity of Facebook, it'd still be extremely difficult to convince users to switch. For messaging platforms, there is a non-profit organization that has a secure and private messaging app (Signal) but few people use it compared to Facebook Messenger, Telegram and KakaoTalk (which by default don't use end-to-end encryption) or even Snapchat (doesn't use E2EE for messages aside from photos) (WhatsApp at least always uses E2EE, not sure about Line.)
> Enshitification requires the profit motive.
Not really. Firefox killed support for WPAs: that alone is enough reason for some to switch to a Chromium-based browser. They've done several questionable UI redesigns that their users don't seem to like (people like a consistent UI.) They're also starting a bad trend of adding new features that they're killing within a year or two (their password manager, their E2EE file sharing service, their encrypted notes.) I personally didn't use any of those features, but for any user who used those new features that they promoted, having to switch a year or two later is a good way to turn them off your products. Google is obviously far worse with this with their various services, but the point is that quality can decrease even when their is no profit motive. I'll agree with you that it's certainly more likely to happy when there's a profit motive though.
>operating costs for Meta in 2022 was USD $87.66 billion
How much of that actual cost is related to running a simple social blogging/connecting tool vs anything that is ad/surveillance/manipulation/etc?
Also, how much are they paying to moderate? Imagine the power of volunteer moderation when supported by a non-profit volunteer-focused organization that values its volunteer assets...
>perfect feature-parity of Facebook
All I wanted was a place to share baby pictures with grandma and they bolted on the panopticon...
>it'd still be extremely difficult to convince users to switch.
Even grandma knows that FB is evil now. She keeps asking me why the baby pics are on Facecrook, but I don't have any good solution for her today.
> How much of that actual cost is related to running a simple social blogging/connecting tool vs anything that is ad/surveillance/manipulation/etc?
It's plausible that the ad/surveillance/manipulation/etc makes up the bulk of development costs nowadays but I'd imagine the actual content (photos, videos, etc.) being served makes up the bulk of the costs. It undoubtedly could be made more efficient, but even if you could cut total operating costs by 99% (very unlikely) you still need $876 million/year. If you can only manage to cut it by 95%, you'll need over $4 billion/year. In any case, Reddit doesn't pay most of its moderators and it's still not profitable, so I don't think moderators make up a significant portion of the costs.
> >perfect feature-parity of Facebook
> All I wanted was a place to share baby pictures with grandma and they bolted on the panopticon...
> Even grandma knows that FB is evil now. She keeps asking me why the baby pics are on Facecrook, but I don't have any good solution for her today.
If you only want to share things with a small number of users, do you even need social media for this? Sounds like something a group chat on Signal or WhatsApp (with notifications silenced) would work for this if everyone you know is willing to use it. I like Facebook because it lets me see what my friends, family and former coworkers that I can't always see often are up to. Hard to stay in contact with everyone you've ever been friends with, but Facebook makes it a little easier.
I agree with you that Facebook is evil in many ways, and I'll 100% advocate for viable alternatives (which unfortunately I don't think distributed/federated networks are, due to regular users being confused by them), but I acknowledge that it's going to be very difficult to get people to switch. Ultimately I think there needs to be a reason to switch other than privacy (as most people don't care), and unfortunately Facebook can quickly copy any unique feature that an alternative network adds. It's not impossible for new platforms to come about, but most new platforms aren't really clones of old ones (TikTok isn't a clone of Facebook, YouTube or really any other major existing platform.) I don't know what the solution is. Not sure how much of an improvement it is for privacy, but in terms of mental wellbeing, I find Discord to be more enjoyable and less addictive, but again, it's not really the same thing as Facebook.
People are willing to pay Reddit, just not the exorbitant rates they’re asking especially when they didn’t lift a finger to empower the people working for Reddit for free.
Moderators do not work for Reddit just like group admins do no work for Facebook. These people are customers who use the product just like any other user. A section of the general population enjoy building and running communities which Reddit has empowered.
Them thinking they’re “working for Reddit” is the reason why so many of them seem out of touch. They are not Reddit employees and Reddit does not need them.
The "volunteer leader problem" boils down to looking for an altruistic individual who's capable and willing to put up with a ton of shit for... love of X.
There aren't many. There shouldn't be any, but some people are awesome.
In reality, you end up having to substitute some package of incentives (prestige, authority, etc.) in order to entice on-the-fence candidates, and then ride herd on ensuring they don't succumb to their baser instincts.
So when mods say mod tools are important, what they're really saying is: "I put up with a lot of shit, to make you money, and I don't get paid. Give me something in return that makes me feel like you're thankful."
Reddit's been pretty bad, historically and presently, at doing that.
I don't have personal experience with this online, but IRL when you volunteer the people you are helping face to face (and others who see your actions) tend to be pretty vocal about thanking you and otherwise showing that they respect and appreciate what you are doing. I imagine online the vast majority of personal interaction is people who are aggrieved, angry, or just plain hate mods on an ideological level. I often wonder how many people go out of their way to directly contact the mods and say "thank you for what you are doing" on a regular basis. I tend to stick up for mods when I see people mindlessly bitching (r/science was terrible for this, because it's actually heavily moderated as it should be), but I only DMed a mod to say thanks on maybe one occasion...
All that is to say, it's one thing to feel like the ratio of hate:love you are getting from users is pretty tilted towards the negative... but getting only empty words and no support from the institutional level is actual injury not just insult. That's why I stand with the mods, and after 10 years or so of daily usage I have left reddit for good (or until reasonable accommodations are made).
Although I'll admit, I've been wanting to break my reddit habits for a long time, so this decision does include some self-interest on my part.
platforms create a two sided market, inflating their own value as middlemen and blackbox (if not publicly listed). What mastodon showed is: how high is the bill really? as in: given the opportunity, maybe users will foot the bill and having an incentive to optimize for cost.
My only worry is a tragedy of the commons scenario.
Federated social networks have been talked about for decades, I have yet to see it gain any traction. I’d be happy if I ever saw one taking off in my lifetime, but the economic incentives are just not there.
I don't think federation is a good solution without a way to also centralize those communities. Discoverability and overlapping communities leads to way too much balkanization.
> Reddit was a friend when Digg died. Any closed platform can do whatever they want whenever they want and as soon as they decide to start making money.
Who was running Reddit back then?
Leadership matters. Take climate change for example, or anything really.
Okay yeah sure, technically. In practice, you have little to no control over it or your audience and good luck migrating it when you feel like it or when the platform turns hostile.
Looking at who created Discord, I would agree. They will start selling data a lot and do other stuff when the numbers get big like they did with their other business but for now it's a smooth ride on freeness.
Or we're very used to all of this and are relatively fine migrating to the next new place that is still in the "pretending to be good" phase. A social network isn't a bank or a house. I'm not using it with the assumption that I'll grow old and die still using it. When Discord gets bad, I'll move to something else. Or if Matrix or whatever else comes along and is a good option, I'll move to it just like I moved to Discord from TeamSpeak and the dying forum I was on.
> As they make it halfway across, the scorpion, named Reddit, poisons the frog they were riding on. Killing them both.
> Seeing this betrayal, the other frog on the shore turns to his scorpion, named Discord, and says "surely you see now and won't do the same to me." "Of course not" replies the scorpion.
If you only care about API access, Discord already stung the frog on the shore years ago. Reddit was the last holdout for relatively open API policies on a large social platform. Hell, the Fediverse is chock full of people who oppose open access and thought it was unindexable. At one point someone was harassed for the audacity to try and make a Fediverse index. My Mastodon feed is full of people really worried that Meta might try to interop with the Fediverse, even though that's our win condition!
For me personally, API access wasn't the final straw - it was Spez's repeated and malincompetent attempts to justify it. Actually, Spez has had a long history of abusing admin privileges for stupid reasons, and I probably should have left years ago. I can't think of anything in Discord's history that's even remotely as bad as, say, editing the posts of an idiot /r/TD poster to make them look stupider than they already are. So I can understand why someone might move from Reddit to Discord even though Discord has the same policy everyone is angry at Reddit for adopting.
> Discord, for its faults, does not have the same issues.
Yet. Give it time (and clout). They're going to try to move and expand that's for certain, and then it'll be time to become profitable / sellable.
As others commented, they've taken VC money and that comes with strings attached. For another indication, look at the current unique names migration that, while nowhere near the scale of Reddit drama, is leaving a lot of people pretty annoyed.
For context, Discord went from appending 4-digit identifiers, such as “username#XXXX”, to removing them entirely and demanding names be changed en masse.
This has naturally led to multiple cases of stolen identity, which ironically this was advertised to reduce as you could supposedly unify your identity across-platforms. However it was a staggered, unprioritized rollout, not to mention the entire movement to a less private and secure username model being unnecessary. It truly shows that Discord is unsurprisingly just as bad as Reddit, if not worse in many respects.
Yeah, also apparently the premium (paid) members have priority for name picking, meaning someone can subscribe to Discord for a few months, squat the name and cancel.
This makes a complicated situation even more annoying as it paints the thing as a cheap attempt at increasing monetization of the platform.
How do you see that happening? Part of the reason for the pricing on the APIs was to ensure that more people saw the ads. I know I never see them when I use BaconReader.
Monetizing something like Reddit is always going to be a struggle, especially since the Reddit crowd is more tech-savvy than the Twitter and Facebook users, thus more likely to use ad-blockers.
I honestly don't know of a way that a social networking system can ever have a near-universal scale and still make money. Sure, a niche community that relies on contributions from its members to offset development and hosting could work, but not Reddit or Twitter with they way they're going. FB is still going pretty strong, but last I checked, 70% of the main feed content I saw were ads.
Let's put this in context, Reddit has somewhere in the region of 1.2 Billion users a month and supposedly earn somewhere in the region of $350Million a year in advertising revenue. This is a very good business and something that could easily be profitable.
The issue is they took in VC investment at a $10Billion+ valuation and for that $350M is not enough they need to probably triple it to get somewhere close to that valuation.
So let's not confuse on paper profitability with desired profitability at current VC valuation.
I think what bugs me the most about this current backlash is that _API pricing_ was the thing that offended everybody, not the reams of things that reddit has done over the past 10 or so years to deserve a backlash.
It wasn’t, and isn’t, about API pricing. 3Ps have repeatedly expressed their understanding in that regard. It was the exorbitant rates being charged, the 30 timeline given to make the changes, and the unwillingness of Reddit corporate to even take the money of those who expressed a willingness to pay.
All of this is a result of bad faith efforts from Reddit corporate which never would have happened had it been handled differently from the outset, or adjustments made at any point in the process. Instead, Huffman has chosen the “do or die” route.
I'm not sure the good wording for it, but it's sort of the "it's not the crime, it's the coverup" situation. Some small set of folks were mad about the original API stuff. The response to those people was so wild, acrimonious, and abusive that it pushed a lot of other people over the edge.
I would probably have still been using Reddit today if it was just the API change, but at this point I've quit out of almost pure spite.
Personally, I moved because the redesign (from years ago) pushed the community in a bad direction. I don't like the current reddit, and people talking about alternatives is what pushed me.
The part that gets me is that they serve totally different use cases. Reddit is a message board; people post things and then discuss them over a period of time. Discord is a chat program; any thing discussed "in the past" (more than 5 minutes ago) is pretty much gone, and it's almost impossible to follow "a discussion thread". Discord is absolutely awful for anything but live discussion. And Reddit is anything but live discussion.
Discord does has a "Forum" mode for channels. I cannot for the life of me figure out why no servers seem to use it. Trying to follow conversations or find useful info in a normal chat channel is incredibly frustrating.
The forum (as well as ‘stage’ and ‘announcement’) feature requires changing to a “community” instance which has some other strings attached. AFAICT long-running servers would never know the new setting is available.
This is exactly why I cringe when any company support or communities say “check out our discord!” Which equals to me “you’ll never find anything and we don’t care!”
And it doesn't make sense as Discord doesn't even work like Reddit does.
With Reddit you have posts and comments, but with Discord you have an ongoing discussion. With Reddit communication is async, but with Discord it's live.
I even use Discord, but the forum model is superior for almost all interactions I'm interested in.
I agree. While Discord brings some unique community tooling aspects to the table, it does not fit the forum model given the data is walled off.
I've been working on a platform that's sort of like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid that combines the feature set of Discord with the discovery and threaded style of discussion of Reddit.
I felt like this is what I am missing as well from many of these subs going to discord. It might make some sense for meme subs and such, but not for the vast majority of subs.
I don’t think so. Discord is already enshitified enough that people won’t rely on it to the same degree. For example, you’ll never see people appending discord to random search queries because it’s closed off to search engines anyway, so that doesn’t do anything.
As others have mentioned, discord is highly ephemeral, so you won’t see people depend on it much as a repository of long-term knowledge. It’s a chat server for throwaway discussions and meeting people for gaming.
Hate to be the breaker of bad news, but a lot of niche libraries and communities (especially modding communities) have foregone documentation in favor of discord chats since they're keeping their message storage for a relatively long time.
Exactly, I have no beef with Discord, but it's the same funding model as the rest of them and that's the part that's broken.
Reddit for its part could have contacted the 3. party developers and asked them to switch to a model where users authenticate with the API individually and billed the users of the apps individually if it's a cost issue. They didn't, because that's not actually the "problem" they are trying to fix.
The majority of Reddit users don't care though, just as the Discord users don't care that search engines can't find the content. Louis Rossmann was right, the Reddit blackout is a joke and Reddit has already won. The people who are moving is the minority and perhaps not worth much in Reddits ad financed doom scrolling reality.
It's a weird time where things that could be a service would rather sell ads, things that should be a standard alone products is a subscription and the products that used to be ad supported is dying because ads space is cheap.
I do think Discord has a better story when it comes to it being able to monetize cleanly. They have clear and useful features to sell, and have done so decently successfully as far as I know.
It's not to say that they won't get worse, but they seem to be starting from a better baseline understanding between them and their users about what's on offer. They've also just got a better baseline product and seem to be taking better care of it than Reddit ever did.
It's not about the API pricing, it's about killing the only decent apps for browsing the website. Reddit needs 3P apps because their app sucks. Discord doesn't because their app doesn't.
Discord has a good official client, Reddit no longer has any good client.
Of course, the wheel of enshittening could land on Discord someday. But for now it's a pleasure to use while Reddit is a chore.
Conversation doesn't have to be visible on search engines. The last thing I did on Reddit was to remove all my comments anyway. If I can feel more anonymous and ephemeral on Discord that's not a bad thing.
Exactly. I've been advocating for people to move their communities to self hosted servers for quite some time. At the end of the day reddit doesn't serve video. Hosting bills would be cheap and cheerful with as much API access as the community wants.
Sounds like Reddit need to have a RSS feed or rethink their business model. Maybe Reddit will just be a type of social benefiting site that doesn't rely on a business model. Don't know what the VCs that funded them will think though.
I use RSS for Reddit and don't plan to ever log in again. This latest upheaval reminded me I was spending too much time there and after taking a break I've realized most of the content is garbage. Now Reddit is just another feed to a site I don't participate in (like the cesspool that is Slashdot).
Discord is convenient and polished, plus there’s only one Discord and many already have an account there.
I don’t agree that it’s a good alternative to Reddit but I can see why people might find it more appealing than something like a Lemmy instance.
I think federated social media can become more appealing but to do so it’s going to have become extremely well-polished and full of features to overcome the need to choose an instance and register an account. There’s not much room for rough edges.
Looking at the twitch stream of the reddit protest you can tell that most people have no idea what the hell is going on. They have no idea that they're not paying for a free service, they have no idea what this means for users of a free centralized service, and all they really want is to hang out somewhere and feel empowered.
Yeah, it's quite strange. Not only in the fact that it's even more closed and walled off than Reddit (as you correctly note), but it's not even the same "type" - Discord is an IRC-type, not a newsgroup-type.
It's just plain weird in the context of a reddit alternative.
I have been on reddit since digg did their redesign. For the past many years I have only used the Apollo mobile app. I have zero desire to switch to the official app as it is awful.
Apollo is reddit to me so instead, I will be hanging out here more and kbin.social
Except Reddit's management has made it pretty clear that Reddit is in fact a walled-time-bomb, everything you love about Reddit can be blown with a 2 months notice (if any, I'm not aware of any notice before they removed i.reddit.com earlier this year).
/r/3DS is active and not moving. The Discord is there for years. The lemmy instance is not affiliated with the sub (and it has 0 activity compared to the sub)
The kbin AITA has only 2 posts from a week ago. While the main sub is still alive and active with thousands of comments on each posts
etc.
Feels like this a site for showing alternatives to the subs not "where Reddit communities have relocated" which is very misleading
Discord has lower API limits and zero "3rd party apps" so the fact that it's the recommended darling child of people fleeing reddit because of "low API limits" and "them taking away 3rd party apps" makes zero sense.
The "Lemmy" thing is even worse; a complete mess. For example, /r/aww has two different links, with different content, etc. And yes, I understand how the "fediverse" works, it just makes no sense in the context that most consumers want their media in.
Most people don't want third party Reddit apps because they inherently like third party apps (some people do want FOSS apps, but that's the minority). People largely want third party apps because the first party app is terrible.
Third-party apps were first. Reddit bought Alien Blue in 2016 IIRC, a reasonably mature third-party app, to turn it into their official app and promote it very aggressively in mobile browsers.
yes, and they did a horrible job of that. And instead of listening to feedback to improve the app (some improvements of which mods rely on to do their free labor) they aquired and then butchered, they reduce choices.
There is an api you can use to make a third party client, last I saw it's actually just the same as the bot api but you just identify as a "human" instead.
Users risk getting banned for "self botting" if you do this though. AFAIK there is no option to pay to do this either.
They give you one option, but people like that option. It isn't annoying, it isn't buggy, and it works roughly as well as the web interface (which you can also use on mobile).
In my experience it's the instability (YMMV on that, for me in manifested in videos not working more than they did, heavy stuttering while scrolling. Not issues I have in RIF), low content density, significant number of trackers. Obviously I don't like all the ads being shoved in the middle of my feed, but I'm not against monetization.
I mean inlined ads for one thing - we're talking paid marketing posts masquerading as user-created content, some of which are utterly obnoxious (e.g. the 'he gets us' jesus ads)
Same as the redesign, it's optimized for consuming images in a platform I came to to read discussions. And it does a horrible job facilitating text for long form discussion. It's trying to be instagram, I don't want instagram.
Also, I don't think it's at all controversial to suggest the video player is one of the worst I've used. I dread trying to load up native videos on desktop (new or old design), I can't imagine it being better on the app.
----
those are the biggest issues that will never be reconciled. Others include features you probably don't care about unless you're a power user. Ability to filter posts/users. favoriting certain subs, various mod tools that STILL have no alternative (even on desktop), proper responsive design for tablets, an actual other discussions option, visible flairs etc. I could go on all day with nitpicks (each of which I requested to reddit at some point years ago. Some of which were promised but never realized).
Is it terrible? I know everyone says it is, but for example on iOS it has a 4.8 rating over 2.8M reviews. Apollo, the really popular 3rd party client, has a 4.7 rating over 170K reviews.
So, clearly someone likes the Reddit app, right? Those millions of 5 star reviews are definitely not fake/bought.
Might be an android thing, but the reddit app keeps malfunctioning for me. For example, very common behavior is that I click on a post, and nothing happens. I click on the post again, nothing happens. I start scrolling, and after 30-60s, the post I clicked on finally opens twice (so to get out of it, I have to press "back" twice).
The Reddit app, for me, is garbage. I am surprised it's not better; it feels like the devs aren't really using it.
I would politely remind you that people, myself included, are fully cognizant of everything you have said but are still switching away from Reddit. You may want to take a minute to think about why that is, without sarcasm or the presumption of stupidity.
I understand that you folks are upset that the market has shifted and advertisers and investors are no longer able to prop up companies running at a loss anymore.
Twitter is charging for their API, Reddit is charging for their API, and people don't like change. I'm not sure where I've had "sarcasm or the presumption of stupidity" but that was certainly a strange section to add to your comment.
This comment is a perfect example. People are not upset that the market has changed and advertisers/investors are not somehow proping up the unwashed masses.
People are upset because reddit (with the jerk in charge) are screwing them over. And they are not only screwing them over they are lying through their teeth. On a platform that has 0 value without the work of the users generating the content.
Twitter? Twitter is a dumpster fire. Reddit will join it soon.
the thing you're missing here is that some people have strong emotional attachments to their subreddit communities, to the point of considering it to be part of their identity. I was like this, once, many years ago, and while I can't quite understand why anyone would've stayed on an obviously-sinking ship this long, I can see where they're coming from.
the thing that should've clued you into this is how emotionally-charged and defensive the language used by these people is (let alone the desire to stage a virtual "protest"…)—once you see this pattern, it's easy to identify going forward.
What a take. Advertisers are no longer "willing", not "able", to prop up Twitter at the moment.
Most people believe that charging for the APIs is reasonable. You might be missing the primary arguments going on about egregious costs and unreasonable (and often unexplained) timelines.
I moderate several subreddits and have written my own apps/bots that perform various functions, such as updating CSS flair based on a remote set of changing assets, monitoring posts, etc.
I am quite okay with the planned API costs, timeline, and communication. How were you affected by the changes? I read the Apollo guy's posts, but the reality is that he had built a very, very profitable business serving Reddit's content to the masses.
How can you be a moderator on reddit, defend reddit on other sites, meanwhile they still don't have adequate native moderation tools that have been promised for months now? I genuinely don't get such allegiance. At least get paid for it or SOMETHING.
A moderator is a volunteer position that people do because they want to run a community. It is not “unpaid” labor, and moderators acting like they’re doing anyone favors is ridiculous. If it’s too much work for you to do for free then step down and tons of people from the community will step up.
>A moderator is a volunteer position that people do because they want to run a community.
in the same way Spec work is a "volunteer position", sure.
> It is not “unpaid” labor, and moderators acting like they’re doing anyone favors is ridiculous.
I'd love for the mods to walk and show how correct they are.
>tons of people from the community will step up.
yes, because reddit never complained about power tripping users eager to be in a position of authority and praise how they make the site a better place. Surely hiring one of those in the midsts of a revolt is the best scenario.
If the mods walk Reddit will be just fine. If Reddit removes them, most of these mods won’t end up back in positions of power, some over hundreds of thousands of people. It’s the mods who need Reddit not vice-a-versa
I’m sorry you’re upset about this, but mods are just users who enjoy running communities (or worse, are paid by an org to curate some mentality.) They are not Reddit employees nor do they improve reddits bottom line. They are just users of a platform, but unlike general users they are the one demographic it’s easy to replace since users tend to think they can do better by default.
>but unlike general users they are the one demographic it’s easy to replace
could not disagree more. You could not pay me to put up with the riffraff of spam, angry users who don't care about me, and maintenance of tools that are not even suppotred by the site, despite relying on them. At least I have a bit of social pressure on my side as a cashier keeping people from throwing punches (a bit).
Someone crazy enough to do that for free isn't someone I let go of (from the perspecive of a
profit seeking executive). I can change algorithms and bargain with Google to get more traffic from "general users".
But I guess we're talking past each other. You seem to see all mods as power hungry and foaming at the tooth to moderate a bunch of users. Sure, you can find SOMEONE, in the samw way on how you can find someone to do odd jobs on the street. That's not equivalent to a proper experienced moderator who has already hit those growing pains. Trying to rationalize this with you is like trying to rationalize at work why you shouldn't lay off experienced talent. I'll just shake my head as the company spirals down and points fingers instead of looking within and thinking "maybe we should value our workers and try and keep them happy".
Reddit's API is free for my use cases. From their documentation: "Our API allows free access to moderators and developers creating these tools for non-commercial use cases."
It’s not, and in OS communities when there is a disagreement, or people do not like the decisions made by core contributors, then people make their displeasure known. And if these problems aren’t addressed to their satisfaction then they take that as an opportunity to leave.
Reddit hasn't been open source for a decade. So, the "open source" part?
If someone really likes my project but really hates me (or vice versa) you can fork my project and keep going. Take all the progress I contributed to and make your own ball.
Reddit, not so much. Maybe you can clone the high level design, but the people wont follow. It's not like OS where contributers are well, contributing. Most of the audience is passive browsers.
It sounds like you aren’t in the same camp of those who are struggling with these changes at reddit. And what does Apollo’s current profits have to do with anything?
I was affected by twitter’s API changes multiple times between January and now. The tangible affects were from their technical mistakes (suspending my apps multiple times and then reverting the suspensions; creating their new API tiers but not actually putting me in one of them without my direct intervention). The less tangible affects were their multiple announcements of pending changes with no timelines or prices, which sowed confusion and were a huge waste of time to think about.
In both cases, reddit and twitter, it takes no effort to see how these API changes could have been more professionally rolled out.
>I am quite okay with the planned API costs, timeline, and communication. How were you affected by the changes?
Every app of choice I'd use for reddit is shutting down in a week. I don't like the supposedly official app.
I already disdained reddit for several reasons over the years and this is the camel that broke the straw. I have no issues paying for good service (I bought a SomethingAwful account over a decade ago, and I donate to Tildes) and I don't think reddit is a good service, in its platform, its community, nor its general paradigms. It is not moving in a direction that I want to support. If that means a lonely migration to a new community, so be it. Not the first time, won't be the last.
>but the reality is that he had built a very, very profitable business serving Reddit's content to the masses.
and reddit didn't benefit from that free labor at all.
This is always such a weird angle to take. That some dude paid 2 other people part time and hes stealing from a billion dollar coporation who employs 2000 people as is. Shocker that one is profitable and the other struggles.
>uch as updating CSS flair based on a remote set of changing assets
yeah, remember when reddit said it would implement native flairing? Glad you did that work for them (likely built on the work of others' free labor).
2.5$ a month for the average user of third party apps isn't really egregious. Especially since you can also use your own API key and have something close to 100rq/sec for free.
Obviously for FOSS apps they can't stop someone from recompiling the app with their own API key baked in, but the barrier to entry there is significantly higher.
Ahhh! Unsurprisingly, It seems like there is already a revanced patch for the Reddit sync app that allows you to use your own API key. So I guess users will just start doing it anyways, but still I wasn't aware of that restriction
because they don't want the apps to stick around. that's why they're not negotiating, that's why they made the pricing so high (also to take advantage of AI scrapers), that's why they're making a bogeyman out of tpa devs.
Because this was never about getting a cut in 3rd party app revenue. They want to be the only app in town, one single experience that all ads can flow into.
Now it begs the question: why not force 3p apps to show ads to non-premium users? I imagine control is the answer there. Easier to show to adverts how good one app is doing then verifying proper ad placement in every 3p app.
It's pretty apparent you do not, in fact, understand, since nothing you have said resembles reality, but rather lazy strawmen.
It is almost universally understood that no business can operate at a loss, inducing by those who are moving away from Reddit. That you cannot understand this is the "presumption of idiocy" that was mentioned.
> Discord has lower API limits and zero "3rd party apps" so the fact that it's the recommended darling child of people fleeing reddit because of "low API limits" and "them taking away 3rd party apps" makes zero sense.
The majority of kids these days have been stockholm-syndromed into loving closed gardens like Reddit or Discord. Nobody taught them to that companies and closed gardens manipulate them for their own power. Open, decentralized communities are dying because of it.
What makes the experience of "kids these days" usign Reddit/Discord so different than...
"kids those days" using MySpace/FB/Instagram 10-15 years ago?
or "kids those days" using AOL 25-30 years ago?
After maybe a brief window from approx 1999-2004 of migrating from AOL's walled garden to disparate forums and such (at massively smaller scale), it's been moving from one walled garden to another for basically 20 years now.
Anyone who wants to change that would be really well served to think about why that has been vs just tossing around stuff like "stockholm syndrome" and "nobody taught them." I don't think "the kids" are nearly as blindly trusting in things like the TikTok algorithm as you think, I think the choices are much more complex than just "if only someone would tell them the flaws they'd all move."
There was some semblance of openness and creativity in most of the previous walled gardens. Myspace let you style your profile with CSS and embed stuff. Facebook used to let you run your own chat client. AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo all had semi-open protocols and as a result we had Trillian/Pidgin/others. Things were somewhat centralized but they were connected via open protocols. It was a beautiful time.
To say nothing of the fact that the cultural zeitgeist has changed from kids distrusting "the man" to kids openly bragging about sponsorships and "influencers" whoring themselves out for likes and free product. Content that was accessible, linkable, archivable, and searchable now lives in millions of miniature jails. And then we get something like the Reddit apocalypse that just happened and now the internet is missing vast swathes of vitally important information, because one stupid fucking CEO wanted to take his company public.
This sounds like rose colored glasses. By AOL I don't mean AIM, I mean "AOL keyword [whatever]" sites, especially pre-opening-up-of-AIM, which was as walled garden and corporate as you could get compared to what the open web or Usenet was then. And Facebook beat MySpace in large part because of the comparative lack of control (and wasn't even "chat" in those days at all).
I personally don't place nearly as much value on diversity of clients to access centralized services as you. Isn't that exactly what led to that "Reddit apocalypse"? An illusion of openness with a giant corporate SPOF, just like all the other ones? Chosen by the kids of 10-15 years ago? If not for the transitory nature of Reddit becoming popular as the surge of the mobile migration catching people off guard, you probably never get the same appearance of openness in the first place - but as long as the content was centrally hosted, it was the same closed-garden story. Same with all the old no-longer-viewable picture tweets that relied on one or another flash-in-the-pan image hosting service... Reddit, Twitter, all of them were never anything but walled gardens, and people in the fading non-walled-gardens in the last 2010s certainly called that out.
Nor is thinking everyone else is a sellout anything new. Certainly not newer than the 90s. The target of that message was the huge number of people who always did buy the pop products in the first place. Nobody would care about raging against the machine if the machine wasn't dominant. And isn't it telling that all those generations still ended up going with The Man or becoming The Man? Maybe it isn't an effective approach.
There was never a substantial amount of informational content on AOL proper, it was all advertising or mass media-generated stuff. User-generated content in the discussion boards that I remember was insubstantial and in any case there weren't really proper search engines back then anyway. None of your friends were like, "check me out on AOL keyword Bob Smith", putting content on AOL was effectively impossible outside discussion boards or chat. (Which IIRC was inundated with a/s/l bullshit)
I'm OK with the patchwork of image hosts fading out because they are archivable. I can still right-click to save what interests me, and the image is hosted at a URL anyone could punch in or scrape. Except more recently, where we all apparently hate bots and we've let our bandwidth providers become highwaymen for a resource that is supposed to be free.
I'm not saying this stuff needs to be immortal, it just needs to be distributed, archiveable, linkable, and accessible from the client of your choice. Reddit suppresses scraping and nobody seems to have anything cached in an accessible way, at least judging by Google results.
> And isn't it telling that all those generations still ended up going with The Man or becoming The Man? Maybe it isn't an effective approach.
Where there is an effective ecosystem that avoids "The Man" I think you will still find those people. They are not highlighted or lifted up by the masses. Instead most folks will make the contemptible choice of sucking off the corporate cock in exchange for a relatively easy and mindless, monotonous, consumptive, pathetic little life. I know this because I did it too. But I am much happier having weaned myself from its bosom.
"Instead most folks will make the contemptible choice of sucking off the corporate cock in exchange for a relatively easy and mindless, monotonous, consumptive, pathetic little life. I know this because I did it too. But I am much happier having weaned myself from its bosom."
Yeah, it's not just "kids of today", is it? Almost all of us have chosen convenience over distributed, decentralized, robust, linkable, exportable platforms at some point.
All the way back to the days of those corporate media and commercial advertising sites inside of AOL bringing more new users to the web than plain Usenet.
I just don't think it's despicable at all. Running a discord channel instead of hosting a web forum? A lot easier to spin something up quickly with multimedia capabilities for a community without technical knowledge. It could all go away tomorrow, or slowly get shittified... and people will move on to something else again.
People having to ask questions anew that have already been answered in the past? In-depth knowledge of yesterday's culture fading away? To me, that isn't a high price to pay. I talk to people on HN (walled garden), some others on forums (a mix of corporate walled garden or independent ones), some others on Discord (walled garden), it's all good enough IMO. Certainly not a moral failing for anyone. Saying something like "contemptible choice of sucking off the corporate cock in exchange for a relatively easy and mindless, monotonous, consumptive, pathetic little life" doesn't make me think you're any happier for avoiding it... those are not the words of the content.
>"kids those days" using MySpace/FB/Instagram 10-15 years ago?
knowledge. Kids in the myspace days were relatively safe. The dark patterns of Facebook weren't public until well after it became the social media website.
If reddit/discord kids choose not to heed this knowledge, this is on them. They should be better at googling and consuming news than the Myspace kids were. I'll hold them to a higher standard.
>or "kids those days" using AOL 25-30 years ago?
in the early AOL days there wasn't even an easy way to receive online transactions. People who had AoL had it delievered to them on a disc, bought or given to them physically. There could be viruses, and the 90's internet was truly the wild west, but this was well before the mantra of "the Internet never forgets" was really something to worry about.
>it's been moving from one walled garden to another for basically 20 years now.
I don't have issues with the concept of a walled garden. But I'm not a fan of putting all my eggs into one basket. Even if we have a truly benevolent ruler, they may one day pass away and transfer power to a tyrant. Always have a backup plan.
That's my issue, it seems the internet is closing off more and more and converging into a few critical points of operations. Seemingly forgetting the idea that every empire falls. I don't care if Reddit devolves into a glorified eternal commercial, I care that no one is prepared to properly move to something else, anything else.
Unlike Reddit Discord has a good client. Reddit forcing people on its official app is the issue, and would be less so if it was any good. As it is, it's not, because of a long list of bugs (as egregious as not displaying the right post, videos not playing...) and a long list of misfeatured (e.g. recommending me subreddits I have zero interest in, while the fact that I'm subscribed to dozens of subs might suggest I have content discovery dialled in...).
Absolutely untrue. The number of things you can't do with Discord vastly exceeds nearly every chat client out there that precedes it. Want to watch multiple chats? Fuck you. Want to filter notifications by server/sender/other criteria? Fuck you. Are you a power user? Fuck you. Do you want important content indexed by search engines? Fuck you. Want to break a conversation out into its own window? Fuck you.
Oh but hey it has a cute logo and you can post gifs. Because apparently people need to anthropomorphize their computers and are incapable of expressing themselves with their words.
> I understand how the "fediverse" works, it just makes no sense in the context that most consumers want their media in.
There are several different use cases for Reddit. One is low-value media consumption, similar to TikTok and the primary usage of Instagram. /r/aww is that sort of thing. New.reddit and the Reddit app are optimized for this use case, and you're probably right that any friction between the viewer and the next picture of a cat being cute will reduce engagement considerably.
Another is discussion forums around a common interest, often a niche interest. The small fraction of users who post original content and answer difficult questions are a big driver for these kinds of communities. When those kinds of people decide that Reddit is no longer acceptable, communities built there will wither. If those people move to Lemmy, people will put up with a bit of friction to follow them.
I think it's better thought of as alternatives than replacements.
It has an "official" badge for alternatives that have been somehow endorsed by the moderators (or old moderators in the case of removals) of a subreddit. In the case of /r/3DS, the Discord is marked official and the Lemmy community is not.
I agree. I'm not aware of a single sub that has wholesale moved to a lemmy instance. There's def a big increase in fediverse usage, but to say entire communities have migrated already is beyond hyperbole, it's just marketing speak.
>How can you migrate a sub when other people on reddit can still use it?
there were still people on Digg for over a decade after the "digg migration". I think you're taking the term a bit too literally.
besides, migrations in software work the same way. You don't cold turkey drop the old tools. You make bridges, start weaning people on new tools, and phase out the old. That's the concept behind deprecation models.
No subreddit can fully move. Reddit is too popular for everyone to leave. A mod can start a new place but if they threaten the the sub itself like going private or not allowing posts the company can just open it with new mods.
Yuep, some I follow on that list are still quite active on Reddit. I see no reason to leave and lose the convenience of discoverability, single-side on, single app, searchability, etc...
I'm just a big fan of ActivityPub. It seems like the next logical step. Perhaps there'll be bigger ActivityPub providers in the future but in theory, just like SMTP, I can talk from my thingy to your thingy. It's up to us to abstract the protocol away and make it easier for users.
What I find interesting is that we are in the middle of A tremendous social experiment where two of the biggest closed platforms on the web recently took major steps to push away and alienate their users, leaving federated platforms as an enticing alternative. It's been very interesting to see who did and did not migrate, and what the growing pains have been as, for the first time that I know of, actual normies tried out some weird open source hacker shit en masse.
> It's been very interesting to see who did and did not migrate
The people who migrate are basically the people in the intersection of technically inclined, "we need social media," and "big tech is bad."
I think having a protocol that can be abstracted away to meet user needs is a great idea. But as it currently exists, Mastodon will always be niche. Too many weird tradeoffs that can only be forgiven by passionate advocates who understand their technical roots. Perhaps there is further development to the protocol or abstraction that can change this, but as it stands, Mastodon is only for passionate social media users who are technically inclined and resentful against big tech.
This is unfortunately always going to be true of any technology. If there's someone willing to cut corners for convenience, they will win the majority of the audience with even a small amount of competence. And by cut corners, I mean betray and abuse and exploit their users. Quality (in security, in privacy, in functionality) creates friction, even if it's minor, and animals generally take the path of least resistance.
Heavily dependent on the circles one’s part of in my experience. Everybody I followed when I moved to mastodon several months ago (mostly devs, apple users, and a few designers) are still there, actively post, and have no plans to return.
I've had a similar experience, except in my case a bunch of the bigger posters found they no longer automatically got a ton of attention on Mastodon and without that dopamine feedback loop they just gave up microblogging entirely.
Most artists I follow also just dropped Twitter entirely and are on Instagram exclusively now (much to my dismay, the Instagram UI is nails on chalkboard to me.)
It's interesting how differently the experience has turned out for different crowds.
I've seen numerous anecdotes from more technically-inclined types saying that their Mastodon posts not only get greater engagement than their Twitter posts did, but that the average quality of engagement is much higher and closer to an actual conversation.
I imagine it depends on how much you played the advert game. While twitter is massive, it is very easy to get buried if you don't play by their rules. Techy posters are the antithesis of that algorithm: focused on text more than pictures, trying to deliver links to non-mainstream sites or personal blogs, rebelling against authority, probably sparse in their use of hashes.
So I can see a more intimate setting benefitting them more than a more traditional content creator who is already used to all those hoops.
Twitter is harder to move off of because so many companies use it to report news. celebrities, media, even governments now deliver news on Twitter. Those entities were never going to care about small squabbles.
Reddit, not so much. Not that I don't think a lot won't simply go back, but a lot more people will probably leave, maybe even enough to create a network effect to begin the sparks for a new, proper competitor.
"en masse" is definitely an exaggeration. This was mostly wishful thinking plus lots of astroturfing from journalists trying to stick it up to Elon Musk. It never amounted to much in reality.
It was pretty big increase in interest and public visibility for something that most people don't normally know or care about. I make no claims about how many people actually started using these platforms or are still using them after a couple of months.
and just like SMTP, will be slightly extended by large companies until the small guy can't keep up any more (or are there still people running smaller email servers that can talk with Google Mail?), then taken over, then (eventually?) extinguished
I think it would be super interesting if there became a GMail of Matrix--one super-dominant provider--but it was still possible to have Fastmail and Protonmail etc of Matrix. So you could actually still host your own little community that could still interact with the giant gorilla even if it was challenging to do so. Imagine that whichever federated protocol were extended with spam-blocking features that complicated federation such that it was even harder to run a server than it is today. But it was still possible, especially for those with enough money.
So every once in a while a newcomer like TikTok could blow up and become a fad, but some old grandma could just keep plugging away on their hilariously old-school service and still follow their granddaughter's high school swim team hosted on the hip new shiny service all the kids are going for today.
You don't need to understand the protocol any more than the average person understands email; you sign up somewhere and then you can email anyone.
Except instead of mail, it's microblogging, full-length blogging, image sharing, link-aggregation, etc. that is done with different services that can communicate with each other.
With improved onboarding it could become just a normal thing.
I'm surprised. There are some pretty large and visible subs on this list.
Does anybody know if there's anything like a Lemmy + kbin client that could connect to these multiple fora and build a feed that looks somewhat like what you'd see on Reddit? These individual instances remind me a lot of old forums, which is great, but what I like (liked?) about Reddit was having the ability to subscribe to multiple, high quality subreddits and have them all in a single feed.
Somehow people should be made more aware of this. You need just one account and it does not matter where you create it as long as you can trust that the server stays up.
That isn’t 100%. Instances can be blocked from federating. For instance if you are on lemmy.world you are no longer getting beehive posts because beehive disabled federation with lemmy.world
I think kbin has the best interface and I am hoping they get “multireddits” implemented soon so you can combine communities from multiple servers into a single view
I've been wondering. What does defederation do exactly? Does it only block posting from the defederated instance or does it block both posting and browsing too?
Blocking interactions would be understandable but also blocking read-only subscriptions seem like a mistake.
It's like a traditional social media block but for whole servers. Basically it totally severs the federation between the instances, making it look to each other like they never existed.
Is there a guide to do this for dummies? Subscribing is one thing, but is it possible to "comment" on another instance's community?
Edit: Figured out myself. It wasn't that difficult :) I agree with others that this needs to be mentioned more often. But, when I searched for "dotnet" in lemmy.world, it didn't return "https://kbin.social/m/dotnet" as one of the search results. Is this due to defederation? Is there a way to add a community using a unique identifier instead of searching for it?
You can search local communities, or all communities. If someone else has previously searched and found the remote community you're looking for, it'll appear immediately. If they haven't, you need to already know the url (or short alias) for that community, and search for that... And then it'll take a while to federate, and then anyone can find it with an easy search from there.
It's kind of complicated, but is only a problem for new instances and new communities. After everything is established, it'll be a lot easier.
I tried to search with the full URL and it didn't show up. That's why I thought it wasn't the way to do it. But I can now see it when I search for it. So, you are right, it takes some time.
You can also follow Kbin Magazines and Lemmy Communities (subreddit) from Mastodon. They are Groups on Mastodon. I am not sure about posting a top level, but I can comment.
No you can't. If the community is hosted on an instance that doesn't federate with the one you have an account on, you can't interact with that community.
Most of the large subs I see in this list haven’t actually “moved”. These new sites linked have very little (if any) content and the subs themselves are still very active.
Some of them seem legit, but a majority of what I clicked seem like random people trying to ride the drama and make their own spin-offs.
Is there any way to actually practically use kbin/lemmy from a mastodon account?
Finding a post using a kbin/lemmy server and then copying and pasting the url into mastodon in order to interact with it is not practical.
I have also seen a lot of people say they ended up subscribed in a way that resulted in getting all comments instead of only top level posts when they subscribed to communities, which is also not at all practical. Is there a way to subscribe to top level posts within a community?
Even though it's possible to subscribe across instances, I think it would make the most sense if there was a single UI that the user can configure like an RSS reader that would bring relevant content from those the user has subscribed to. The user could then read and comment from within the tool (using whichever account they choose).
There's someone working on this interesting project.[1] It's a Lemmy<->Reddit proxy that translates requests between the two APIs so you can use Reddit apps to browse Lemmy. If it gets some traction, it will be a great tool for helping new people coming from Reddit to settle in.
There's a handful of apps that exist for phones, I use Jerboa at the moment. It's easy enough to get a feed of all subscribed communities, but subscribing is a bit of a pain every way I've tried, and most communities aren't active enough to get a good feed like you can with Reddit. Part of the problem is that most the popular instances of Lemmy are getting bombarded with traffic and availability isn't great. Just hitting subscribe doesn't always work, which is likely related to server health as many instances haven't let people log in or sign up periodically.
There's also some defederation issues, so you may need several accounts and then stich them all into one feed to truly get everything you want, but I've not attempted that.
First, about the site. The "back" functionality is kinda messed up here. I typed something in then hitting the back button removes the last character. Go to site, type "gaming", hit back, get same page with "gamin", hit back, get same page with "gami." etc.
Second, about subs going permanently private. It's a major blow for small, local subs. My city's sub went permanently private. It's a pretty small sub. It's not really sticking it to reddit like a large sub is (which has a big bank of widely useful knowledge). And its too small to probably migrate (its not on this list for example). It pretty much only hurts the people in that community and doesn't hurt reddit.
This site seems a bit dodgy, it’s telling people that Reddit’s 3D printing community has “relocated” to some random Lemmy site that seems dead other than one person just filling it with posts simply titled “balls”.
Most of those things seem to be true. The 3dprinting mod did endorse those 2 alternatives, and they seem to be the mod of one of them, they also seem to be doing a terrible job moderating the instance they created, and the users of r/3dprinting seem to be spamming it because they disagree with how the mod handled things, and I'm guessing the mod didn't get buy-in from the users of the sub before trying to migrate.
I don't think that necessarily makes sub.rehab dodgy, they are accurately communicating alternatives both mod-endorsed and not.
That instance was from one of the mods, they posted about it here on HN a couple days ago too. They got roasted hard on r/3dprinting, but it's "official" as it can be. Personally moving to an instance that doesn't involve the mods (of any subreddit) is a benefit.
Yeah this pisses me off because the ADHD Lemmy community lives on lemmy.world , but I’m signed up to beehaw, which recently announced they’re “de-federating” from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works for reasons… and now I have to keep multiple accounts with hopefully my same online handle just to see all my communities I’m subscribed to in a single feed like Reddit does? Ugh… fucking headache. Or run my own lemmy instance? I don’t want to do that… I want a “front page to the internet.”
> now I have to keep multiple accounts with hopefully my same online handle just to see all my communities I’m subscribed to in a single feed like Reddit does?
better than losing literally everything because beehaw shut down. I already manage multiple accounts for multiple types of communities (including HN), at least the interfaces between these sites are somewhat similar and under a common protocol.
>I want a “front page to the internet.”
I'd rather not have all my eggs in one basket at this point.
But this did oddly remind me of RSS feeds, which were meant to do all this. Minus the modern UI, of course. Do these federated communities support RSS?
That’s a really good point actually. I’d definitely take the time to setup RSS feeds for each thing if it gave me the sort of experience I’m after. I’ll miss the comments sections though since that’s where a ton of golden information from Reddit came from.
> This is not and is not meant to be a Reddit replacement. The original community here has decided to carve out a space for itself because we grew increasingly upset with modern social media.
Instead of api business model reddit should have blocked google indexing like Facebook does and force everyone to use reddit search and then show ads in search results rather than forcing people to go to google and append “reddit” to the end of search results which i had been doing for something like 99% of my commercial searches. Google has been eating reddit’s lunch… not random third party apps like Apollo.
No, if reddit does that they lose a giant amount of traffic. And reddit search sucks they should improve it first if they want that. But also for many things you do not necessarily search for reddit but just search a question and reddit turns up in search results. If that goes away, reddit will have less visits and become way less usefull for many things
Honestly the traffic reddit gets from google is probably << traffic from organic reddit users. Even for myself as a non-Reddit user I intentionally search Reddit through Google. What you say holds true for smaller sites, but there's a reason Facebook blocks Google indexing (for the most part), and it's because Facebook wants people to be using Facebook, not Google. Even if Reddit loses some search traffic they shouldn't be giving up that control. It's not like people don't know what reddit is, or that the app isn't sticky (it's obviously very sticky).
>the traffic reddit gets from google is probably << traffic from organic reddit users.
I question "<<" at this point. Maybe "<", but the gap isn't as large as you expect.
It's not going to be as impactful as r/all being removed, but removing google searchability would probaly do more harm to traffic than it does benefit to the site.
>here's a reason Facebook blocks Google indexing (for the most part), and it's because Facebook wants people to be using Facebook, not Google.
I think it's more because Facebook is an inherently more private site. It has public groups but Facebook wasn't made (by default) to have every post you make be searchable from Google.
You search on Facebook for people, and you care about who they are. You search for content on reddit and don't care who redditors are.
Modern social media usage is definitely not private. People do stuff to be seen and both Instagram and TikTok exploit users wanting to go viral.
For Facebook, it was only private in the sense that the greater general public couldn't see your content, but that's really just unrelated third parties and Google. The stuff you post on Facebook was effectively public in the people around you could all see it.
They could combine it with the newspaper model and show 3 open posts to unregistered members before asking them to register. That way Google still allows full indexing.
This is a great idea and I think I heard a few good ideas and even thought of my self a few, about how Reddit could be more profitable. Which is weird, why they went with the API model. It's really suspicious. It's like they want to raise its value fast and dump it. It really looks like the want to sell Reddit.
Better than what they are doing now risking losing 80% of traffic. I mean, blocking Google has costs, but the argument here is the gain of control and revenue makes up for it. Blocking Google is also more of a concern for smaller brands and sites, but Reddit is probably Facebook/Instagram level of users (at least in the US). Most of reddit's traffic is probably coming from retained users, shared links and social media, not random searches.
Or just force API users to publish ads the same way they publish normal threads.
I've used the old.reddit site and ads don't really bother me. On the other hand I've often found the solution to a problem on Google pointing to a Reddit post.
I have to say, watching this car crash in real time has ironically made me browse reddit more, just to watch the drama unfold. It's the same with twitter, these community sites have become so big, that the actions they take themselves are newsworthy.
The way this is unfolding, I can imagine this being a case study in a future revision of 'how to
win friends and influence people', on completely what not to do. If that book is worth it's salt, then reddit's management complete unwillingness to work with its community, and constant lies, leading to virtual riots on its sites, should result in it's total collapse.
yeah, this feels like a list of people trying to move a sub but people aren’t moving just because they tried. I checked the ‘new home’ of AITA, and the last submission was 9 days ago.
Lemmy seems to be OK. I clicked on https://lemmy.ml/c/apple and was entertained and informed rather than the content being about the protest, or about how great some new platform is.
Someone that can hack Swift and likes money:
please make a Lemmy app. Currently there's nothing in the iOS App Store. I will pay 5 dollars. Probably other people will too.
If they continue getting people like you who can't think one step ahead, then they collapse under their own weight. Are you then going to look after another instance or are you going to be complaining about how "it doesn't work"?
Even the lemmy.ml admins (who are also the Lemmy developers) are asking people to find other instances.
Perhaps they should have thought themselves realised that it is not reasonable to expect end users to think one step ahead. Have you ever made software that was used by people?
> be complaining about how "it doesn't work"?
You just stated that it won’t work. I’m not sure why you would blame users for that, they’re not building it.
From the sounds of it, maybe I was wrong and Lemmy isn’t OK.
It's not like they stated a goal of creating something exactly like Reddit. They are building an application that is meant to be decentralized and with no single entity concentrating power - or in the case of social media, "eyeballs".
Do you think they should just say "oh, we set out to build something to help people get rid of Big Tech and Surveillance Capitalism, but people are really impatient so we are just going to scrap that and do that instead?"
The fact that it doesn't work if everyone tries to gather around a handful of servers is a feature and not a bug. If others can not be patient, supportive or understanding enough, then what else can we say besides "good luck and I hope that Big Tech does not destroy you like they are destroying everyone else"?
By "breaking" the bigger nodes, people will disperse to others. The system self-regulates. That to me is a smarter approach than any attempt at "intelligent" design.
> Lemmy.ml has always been a niche site, and it will most likely stay this way. We don’t have any intentions to turn it into a mainstream instance, or set a goal of getting as many users as possible
> having more users would force us to spend more time moderating, and less time for development. Lemmy works quite differently from big tech sites like Reddit in this regard: while they get more money with each extra user through advertising, for us it is the opposite. So we would much rather have a smaller, non-toxic, and friendly userbase, than a large one
They do seem to think someone should do it, but I think are wisely not doing it themselves
> In particular, I would like to see someone (or a group of people) create a mainstream, or liberal instance. That should help to avoid further drama, and avoid attempts to turn lemmy.ml into something that it is not.
But I don't see how this actually solves the core issues - you'd still need someone to run the main instance, they'd need revenue for it. This might take power away from Reddit right now, but does nothing to stop a new company from doing the same thing
Good idea. As an extension, I would love a directory of all communities online. Something Yahoo-esque. I often have trouble finding the right place to ask a question or discuss a topic.
Wonder whether any of the new platforms will gain traction, or whether what happened to Twitter repeats and the users will just return from the alternatives.
I don't think anyone has returned to Twitter from Mastodon, of course most people didn't migrate in the first place, but Mastodon is much more active than it was a year ago.
I think I had this idea about YouTube originally, but it could theoretically be applied to Reddit as well. A way to smooth the transition to a new platform could be to have a system that copies the posts automatically from the old one, and gives the account owner on the old system the option to claim the copied content for their new user on the new site.
Legal issues would probably make it a non-starter though.
Speaking of YouTube, I wonder if Google will get into the game.
The recent blackout has shown that Google search is kind of reliant on Reddit - a lot of top links go to Reddit. I mean Google Search will adapt if Reddit vanishes but why deal with Reddit as a middle man at all?
Google can start its own "Reddit". They already have scalable forum software in the form of the YouTube comment system. Heck, they can even copy YouTube's operating philosophy:
- poster of content moderates their own content's comment section; reduce concentration of power in the hands of a few mods
That’s why I think now that it might be even more important to have user generated content under more friendly license than to have federated systems even. I would be happy to sign up to centralized system that lets users grab their posts and leave if necessary.
kbin.social is pretty good, love the interface. It appears though that I can not upload images to it yet -- it says it is disabled for some reason? A little confused about.
Is there a way to have a simpler protocol for community discovery perhaps? E.g. RSS feed of other RSS feeds so people can search for other communities... so the more you Favorited a new feed the more you discover other feeds?
I wish I could have the site scrape my user page for the list of subreddits I am/was subscribed to. (This would be easy with the API, of course, but...)
With lemmy though, the fediverse is the network. One can subscribe/interact with the other. The real hedge is which 'home' instance is going to be more stable.
Well, if you assume splitting it means splitting your community, it's risky. If you assume splitting it means maintaining both while waiting to see which wins the majority of the exodus, it's less risky but more expensive.
Every mod who decided to attempt to move a sub has now been shown exactly how much their "power" is actually worth, and has been instructed to either comply or lose their moderation rights.
The result is that they're complying, because this never had anything to do with a third party API. They just wanted to be seen participating in something.
Wouldn't it be better if there was a Wikipedia page, that would track where big communities (currently) resides?
Eg. former "/r/thiscommunity" now resides on "XXX" and "YYY"
former "slashdot.org" now resides on "news.ycombinator.com" and "lobste.rs"
or something like that.
My understanding is that anyone who thinks they can sell domains for more than the $185k(?) it costs to create one is a winning strategy. I don't know if there are any ICANN renewal costs, such that a gTLD could actually go bankrupt
it seems most instances hit scaling limits at 1k-30k signups per instance. 1k is more like consumer hardware, a consumer CPU and 32GB of memory type stuff, while using epyc and 128GB or 256GB of memory with enterprise SSDs behind it gets you to 30k.
Federation actually makes this worse because right now there is an all-to-all broadcast model. There is no concept of a "relay" node that is allowed to carry your posts to another, even if you are in an all-connected clique of N nodes you need to connect to N-1 nodes to exchange data, which means load increases with federation.
Obviously there are several pretty clear optimizations that shake out of just my description here, and I assume many smart people are working on it.
On the other hand... this is also where you bump into "everybody kinda wants different things". Do you want other pods to be able to "forge" messages from you? Do you want to sign every message you post (or have your pod sign it for you) to prevent forgery? Do you want to have any ability to ever yank a post back out of the void, or are you comfortable with the "once it's out there, it's out there"?
A lot of people have tacitly different answers to these questions and have never really had to think about it because Reddit provided a one-size-fits-all answer for them, just like the problem of moderation between federated pods. Like, what if you have a great contributor on your pod but he's completely a shithead on politics on some other pod, and people start looking to defederate your pod unless you take care of them? Reddit simply solved this by establishing some global baselines and if you don't like it tough, don't post on reddit.
they are open source projects without major financial backing. Mastodon had a similar challenge last year when people started leaving Twitter en masse.
So we have Reddit, a for profit company controlled by a media corporation, asking other smaller for profit companies making millions out of Reddit's API to pay for access, then somehow moderators go on strike? This makes no sense to me. Like what will prevent these subreddits to be back online with new moderators? Do the majority of Reddit's user base even care about what's going on?
At this point, if you want to be part of the discussion, please do your own research on the topic and try to understand the situation. It's explained multiple times in every news that comes up regarding Reddit (also in this one).
what I saw was an app writer that said his monthly cost per user would be $3, and gave no explanation for why instead of shutting down he wouldn't just charge each user $3 per month (plus a fee)
the mods and power users must fed up with Reddit probably contribute 80 percent of the content, even if they are a minority. Without content what exactly is Reddit? nobody will fill this void because of the nature of a lot of these subs. I mean you really gotta be obsessive a little to continuously moderate weird niche subs like birds aren't real.
A lot of subs will probably switch to bare minimum policing, which is to say only site wide rules which basically turns every sub into a free for all like /r/worldpolitics.
You think it's easy to replace 4 to 10 moderators across 8000 subreddits? I sure you, it most definitely is not.
Be careful what you wish for. SomethingAwful voted out its mods and it went to shit _very_ quickly after. It's very hard to find mods who actually care about a community. Many of the very best communities on Reddit are very strictly moderated because the sad reality is that the vast majority of contributions are shit. If you end up in SA's situation, where strict moderation lead to many users having had at least one negative experience with mods, users might get the idea they know better than the mods how to run their community and any mod who actually curates the contributions runs the risk of getting votekicked.
That being said, treating mods as some kind of tenured position has lead to plenty of abuse as well. Altogether it's going to be a thin line for everyone involved to tread in order to keep these communities intact through all of this.
A major problem Reddit has is that if they go down that route, a "community" will become "the set of people who clicked 'join'". That isn't a very strong definition of "community" to build things like voting mods in and out on.
Right now the mods are the only source of continuity within a community. Let people vote and you get mod vote brigades, and a realistic chance that every major sub on the site becomes /r/politics, regardless of what letters follow the /r/ in the URL, because everyone will vote out anyone who tries to prevent it.
The other thing too is that the entire purpose of a mod is basically to make enemies. The angry people, the unpleasant people, the very people you want them to tone down or ban are also the ones who will vote with maximum vigor. And bot nets, slander campaigns, personal threats, these are the people who have no lines. As a moderator myself, who does it for my own reasons, if I had to "defend" my moderation powers against a community slander campaign I wouldn't so much as lift a finger. I may well just make the ringleader a mod on my way out. I have no motivation to fight that fight. And if that's kind of what you want to hear from your moderator, rather than having a moderator who actually will engage in a community reputational deathmatch to keep their powers, you probably shouldn't encourage a structure that will even further reify needing to spend a ton of energy in politics just to keep their janitorial position.
I think Reddit could survive simply removing the mods & replacing them. I won't guarantee thriving, and it may not economically survive, but some number of users would still keep going. I think making it so communities can vote out mods (and probably by a simple majority vote of those who bother to vote, as is the American Way) actually would kill them, because of the second- and higher order effects of that change. The end result of the Mod Wars of 2023 would be the metaphorical equivalent of the Sahara Desert I referred to in an earlier post [1]. The only people who would persist in such an environment are exactly the ones that you want moderators to remove.
