I’m old enough to have witnessed the early beginnings of the Internet in the 90s - and what’s happening now with the fediverse feels like coming back to its roots.
We may well find that the implosion of Twitter and Reddit - within 6 months of each other - is the beginning of the end for “big tech”. It’s unlikely that it will go away entirely but I do feel a seismic shift happening. I seriously hope that it’s not a false dawn.
On the path to become synonymous with AOL
Not the end of big tech. You’re likely posting from MacOS or Windows and using services like AWS, Azure, or GCP on the sites you use and abuse.
The end of centralized social media though? I hope so.
Someone will try to monetize the fediverse. They may not be successful, but they’ll try.
capitalism world we live in
Oh 100%. The beauty is if they try in a way that is harmful to the fediverse at large they will get defederated in a heartbeat.
When I moved to Lemmy and learned about how federated sites like this work I realized how utterly impossible for something like what’s happening to Reddit to happen. The biggest obstacle to Reddit users migrating right now is the fact that there’s no equivalently sized community to move to.
That would never be the case here. In addition to defederating like you mentioned, users not in the instance in question could easily set up an alternative community, as easy as it would be to open a new sub. Users in the instance in question could easily migrate to another instance. No need to find an alternative platform, no need to make a new account (in most cases), and no need to worry about a new community being active and well established.
While I see downsides to the fediverse, I see some major upsides, especially in the wake of Reddit’s implosion.
Agreed. Big tech platforms make it easy for everyone to participate. But while we gained simplicity, we lost control and independence and creativity. Every website isn’t supposed to look the same. And our expression and activity isn’t supposed to just be grist for the data mill.
I remember fondly the days of early broadband, when tons of people would run a server on an old laptop for an IRC bot or a shoutcast stream or whatever. We need that back. I hear about people doing that with Lemmy instances and Matrix homeservers and the like and it makes my heart sing.
Twitter and reddit won’t implode. But hopefully they keep all the users who just want to mindlessly scroll through low effort content and the smarter ones join the fediverse.
And desire to participate! Commenting on most websites is shouting into the wind. I feel like general engagement has the potential to be better in a decentralised environment.
Lol, fuck spez. I’ve used reddit since 2011 but this debacle has been the last straw for me.
2006 here. Bye,
FeliciaSpez.
It’s crazy that he is probably the only one not seeing how bad he look like and how bad he is destroying reddit
He doesn’t see reddit as a community, he sees it as a way to make money. If he comes out of it with a profit, then that’s a win even if reddit itself dies.
Yeah, he doesn’t cares about the communities. All he cares is the IPO.
At this point I think he’s immolating himself on purpose, and after the api changes are done a new saviour CEO will come, who won’t reverse anything, but with a clean record.
Yeah, that’s a plausible outlook.
He’ll just cash out and fuck off somewhere. Lol
I dont think his plan is even that deep. They have an ipo coming up and spez is set to make yacht money. he doesnt care if he burns the site to the ground cause he still walks out with a giant paycheck
They do stuff like that sometimes, like twitter is doing now, by putting a woman CEO right after Elon set everything on fire, so that twitter vocal minority can blame her and say that Elon was doing everything better. It’s what they call the Glass Cliff. Something similar might be happening here, without the anti-feminist part.
What has that to do with the CEO being a woman? Every CEO after Elon “lost”, trying to get that mess back on track is going to blow up on Twitter, regardless of sex
Pandering to his misogynistic neofascist fanbase?
They have already done this once. I wonder if anyone here remembers the previous CEO…
Nah, he doesn’t care. Between how much he has now, and what he gets in the IPO, he has “fuck you” money now. He knows this is bad publicity, but it won’t matter in the long run.
I’m definitely not going to download the official reddit app, I’m done with it for good. Lemmy’s mobile website is good enough for now, hoping that the Apollo developer decides to make a Lemmy client eventually
I also will never install the official reddit app. I’m trying to move away from reddit altogether for various reasons.
I created this account this morning and am writing this message on Jerboa (got it off fdroid). So far so good!
Fellow Jerboa user here - it’s basic but it has everything needed. Currently I’m in a remote French Polynesian island and it’s perfectly responsive.
Bonjour from Canada!
Bonjour! En tant qu’Américain non francophone, être ici me donne envie de ne pas avoir appris le latin au lycée.
J’ai appris le français au lycée. Je ne me souviens pas de grand-chose par contre. Google a traduit cela pour moi, mais ça a l’air correct.
Oui, il semble que je me sois fait un ami qui utilise également Google Traduction pour communiquer en français. C’est l’essence de ce qu’on appelle la lingua Franka. Quelle chance j’ai rencontré celui qui est connu sous le nom de SkullRot. Bonne journée à vous et bonne chance dans vos efforts.
Yeah I’m on jerboah from the Google app store. Seems to work fine
jerboa exists and works very well
Isn’t that only on android? I’m on iPhone
Mlem on iOS
Yeah Mlem is very buggy and missing a lot of big stuff right now. That being said, folks should use it to at minimum provide feedback so it can improve.
It’s in beta. And Testflight is full. Should be out on July first tho. The Homescreen solution is fine for now.
Why not jerboa? Works decently well… EDIT: nevermind, forgot it’s not on iOS and mlem isn’t great yet
Shit, let’s go back to digg, why not? Is it still there?
checks digg.com
Oh shit, nevermind, here is good!
I mean it is pride month, let him dig in those heels! Silly wording aside, where the heck are Reddit’s PR team and why hasn’t the board put controls on Huffman at this point? Where are the adults in the room? Man this going to fill the minds of conspiracy theorists for a decade.
Finally realized how to sign up for Lemmy. Federated ftw. Insurance against this kind of stupidity.
This exactly. I’ve been a redditor on one account or another for over a decade. For a very long time, read it was 100% of my social media and online community time. That seemed safe because Reddit had always been run in a user-friendly manner.
But then somebody gave Spez a microphone and he managed to destroy 10+ years of community trust and good will in like 3 weeks. Every single thing he says doubles down, reiterates that he doesn’t give a shit what the users want.So it’s time to diversify. This right here is my very first post on Lemmy, never would have bothered with it if not for Spez. But now I am more carefully considering where I invest my time and discussion, and what networks I want to see grow.
With any luck, this decentralized stuff is going to be the answer to enshittification.
Starting this comment a bit flamebatey: I think reddit will stay around and I’m very very grateful to u/spez for keeping his position in spite of all the opposition.
Because he single-handedly seeded lemmy and kbin with enough users to take these platforms out of a niche and make them viable.
Now in the future we wil still have reddit (with a lot worse moderation and a lot more annoying ads) but we suddenly also have an alternative.
Yes, the fediverse already was there before, but when I check out the old content I find it very hard to find something I’d have been interested in - which suddenly changed in the last few days.
It’s like the musk twitter/mastodon. moment all over again. And with federation it at the same time more annoying and feels much more like the old world again, when individual people not huge companies would own the web.
(Btw this is my very first comment ever on lemmy, too - and it suddenly doesn’t feel like it transfer ownership of my words to a corporate giant, anymore)
Reddit will remain but it’ll be just a meme page, I doubt if any of the more specialised, specialist communities will stay. It’ll be just another 9gag. I’ve been on it since 2010, I watched it grow and evolve and it honestly looked very reasonable the whole time, progress was for the better. then spez decided to kill it in a few weeks. Over a decade of progress will be gone.
This whole debacle will end up being a MBA case study in a few years on how not to work with your user community.
Every time I see something like this, I’m reminded of the bathroom scene from fight Club. The listing more than the do not fuck with us part.
Not in the Dick swinging sense of it, but that hunting down and targeting the very people you rely on to function cannot end well.
Reddit has cops and criminals, doctors and fighters, manual labor and execs. Not everyone is going to resist, but the cross section of humanity that does is everywhere.
Spez should actually be very glad that project mayhem isn’t a real thing. He could end up with his nuts sent press release style to a couple of news outlets. He’s the fucking poster boy for the anti capitalist hate brigade at this point.
In my opinion even if he changes his mind and tries to backtrack, the damage is done, for sure.
They’ve already shown their hand, so why should anyone trust them again even if they did backtrack? They’ve proven they don’t care about us and are willing to go back on their words if it benefits them. I don’t see any restoration of community faith in Reddit’s administration.
Because 90% of their users don’t care about APIs or 3rd party apps, they just want the content however reddit makes them consume it.
“… not going to change anything”
Yet look what happened to the fediverse. I wouldn’t be here without his boneheaded move. So it already changed things for me and thousands more like me. I don’t plan on going back.
Yeah for me it was sort of good that this happened as I’ve been meaning to stop using reddit for a while. Was planning on using RSS readers for following news though, will have to get into that more.
RSS-feeds are good for fiding content to post too :)
In the Verge interview, huffman said the api usage costs reddit $10 mio a year. So charging Christian alone double that seems just…greedy.
10 for Reddit and 10 for himself
Reddit CEO Diggs in heels as outrage engulfs website
FTFY
“Protest and dissent is important,” Huffman said. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything because we made a business decision that we’re not negotiating on.”
Honestly, my reply to this particular statement is that maybe Reddit should die!
That quote is fucking wild. spez, a man of the people, all for protesting except for this time because he’s nOt NeGoTiAtInG. Lol k, same bud.
That’s really the only thing left at this point.
If there’s no negotiating, fuck it, burn it down. We built it, we can unmake it, and that bastard can build it back up himself if he’s so damn set on making a profit of it.
He seems to think that the people want the shit that he and his dev team created. They don’t. People want the content of the site. And all he is succeeding in doing here is shoving away a good deal of it
I’m not entirely sure that Steve Huffman understands how protests work. The whole point is you don’t have control over them, friendo.
You can’t just say but we made a business decision and expect people to just say welp guess we should give up, there’s no overcoming business decisions.
Ha…diggs
Yeah. Shit is really going down on reddit right now. Spez is trying to paint this as “power hungry mods are closing down your favourite subs. Let admins control reddit more and we’ll stop the power mods”. Sadly, it really seems to be working for a lot of people. Classic tactic of the ruling class turning people against one another to distract while they fuck people over. Its like the iq of the average redditor dropped over night.
Tons of shills and astroturfers too in every community, basically repeating the same talking points over and over. And then they’ve got doomgloomers who are trying to convince people that it’s pointless. And now lately you have the most insidious assholes, the ones that tell moderators to “protest” by not moderating. That last one is hilarious because if you stop moderating a community, Reddit WILL give it to someone else or ban it.
Either way, this place is nice a cozy compared to Reddit, it’s like in the old days. I’m loving it.
Sadly, it really seems to be working for a lot of people.
Most of those people will realize in a few months… the people posting content of value left, and came here.
And, reddit will become a cesspool like never seen before.
