hey everyone. if you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout today, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy! Thanks!
Yeah, don’t hold your breath for a Lemmy/kbin port of Apollo:
The amount of work it would take to port all the API endpoints over to Lemmy or Kbin or something, that would be a gargantuan amount of work that I’m not sure I have the capacity for. And then just the complexity of making it work. Long term, it’s a big question mark for me that, at this stage, I’m not sure I’m totally interested in pursuing. But it’s also one of those things where I completely wish it the best. And if something that was decentralized kind of became the norm, I think that would definitely be a win for everybody.
Great interview from Christian there, it really is so frustrating that Reddit is and has been so hostile towards him. :(
Can you imagine the dumbasses at Reddit corporate thinking they could turn him into a villain? lol
The leadership is so incredibly dumb that it almost feels like sabotage.
Honestly, it was probably intentional. People shit on spez (rightfully) but he’s doing his job perfectly. He’s looking like an incompetent man child, and finger pointing at a third party using an obviously and probably intentionally weak narrative. He’s put all the focus on himself and how stupid he looks. He’s a punching bag, and in the mean time everyone at the corporate level that actually enacted these changes and is forcing this platform shift is remaining a) anonymous and b) out of the crosshairs.
Has anyone considered creating a bridging API interface for lemmy? Something that can translate between the lemmy and reddit API to make this easier?
Still new, but this was gaining a bit of traction a few days ago:
Surprised nobody’s written a bridge between the Reddit API and ActivityPub to be honest, it would make any Reddit client you want work with the Fediverse.
AskHistorians is taking the approach of “blackout for two days, then read-only moving forward indefinitely.” I think that’s a good approach as it still removes the functionality of the subreddit while reminding people of what they’re missing out on due to the admins’ actions.
I know there are bigger subs, but AskHistorians is an absolute jewel in Reddit’s crown. For all the dumpster fire subs that raise controversy and drag Reddit’s image down, AskHistorians is the one sub that could always be pointed to as a sub with an inarguably positive impact. It’s also a sub in a unique position because its moderators are probably the hardest for Reddit to replace, because many of them are the historians that answer the questions, or have personal relationships with those that do. In addition most of the historians aren’t really Redditors, participating only on AskHistorians. Removing the current mod team and replacing them would absolutely 100% kill the sub forever.
Not that I have any faith in Reddit to do the right thing. I just think it’s interesting to realize just how different of a position AskHistorians in than the rest of the subreddits, being at the same time more impactful than their subscriber numbers show, while being fragile enough to be permanently broken if handled poorly. They are also one of the only mod teams I’ve see who have issued a list of actionable goals that Reddit can address.
Also it’s interesting to see that their participation in the blackout is almost entirely on Spez’s head. That’s some damn fine CEOing there, Lou.
The askhistorians subreddit and it’s mod team are absolute gems, I was able to attend one of their talks at a conference and it was honestly one of the best presentations I’ve seen at these types of events. It is giant loss to the academic community to have them shut down tbh, and I hope they are able to migrate and keep their audience.
But then again knowing Reddit, if they migrate u/spez will probably allow Holocaust deniers to take up the space or something.
I hope one of the archive projects (archiveTeam or others) has backed up r/askhistorians past posts and comments, just in case.
Not to worry, every post and comment on reddit has been archived, and is freely available as a 2tb torrent on Academic Torrents.
I’m surprised how quickly I’ve adapted to fediverse, Mastodon just didn’t fill-in for twitter in the way that the lemmy instances have once I have learned how they work together.
Now that I have gotten over the first hump, it feels new and exciting enough to make up for the lack of diverse content. I really think lemmy/kbin can be the ones that push forward an interoperable internet.
Presumably it’s only going to get better over time. I was afraid I’d lose this part of the internet when Reddit went full corpo, but to be honest the quality of discussion on Lemmy makes up for the diminished content.
Honestly, my discussions have been nicer over here on the fediverse than they were on most parts of Reddit.
It’s like small town, big city, smaller communities are usually happier and more friendly.
I do want it to continue growing, but I will be enjoying it while it lasts.
I agree, the inherit fragmentation in the fediverse architecture has a certain negative impact on the microblogging experience for me (but I still won’t go back to a centralized platform ever again), but for Lemmy/kbin it fits perfectly. Link aggregation sites are already fragmented into separate communities by design.
Yepp, it works surprisingly well. I assume one of the similar communities will eventually “win” on one of the instances, like with similar subreddits over time. Also some instances will go full specific, like nature or movies or gaming etc. See the growth of lemmynsfw already, lol.
I’m really liking it a lot. I wasn’t too amused by Mastodon either, but as you say: for link aggregation, for specific communities, for discussing topics (and not being about people, but about topics) this is a perfect match.
I even view the fragmentation problem in niche communities as a feature not a bug. Don’t like the coffee community on one instance? Try checking out the coffee community on a different instance. You might like the second group of people better
Seeing as you’ve mentioned it, do you happen to know of any coffee communities on here?
Edit: I’ve found !coffee@lemmy.world
Same. Ive already started using lemmy as a place to find solutions to my problems. I just dont google “problem reddit”. I go to lemmy search bar and browse “specific keyword not working”. Been working with certaib topics, and its only gonna get better from now on
I’ve checked both Reddit and Lemmy since I created my Lemmy account yesterday. Reddit has lost a number of subreddits I used to read and the feed seems decidedly less interesting overall. Although the equivalents to all the subreddits I used don’t necessarily exist here, there is some good information here (particularly IT-related) and I think the overall feel of the community here is better - people seem (so far at least) largely pretty reasonable and there aren’t the armies of contrarians or downvoters just wanting to spread their anger at the world to everyone else. So, overall, win some, lose some, and if I end up just here instead of Reddit, I think any losses there will be offset by gains here. Which if you think about it makes Lemmy look pretty good, given that it is (a) relatively new; (b) volunteer-run and funded; © much, much smaller than Reddit.
People say Lemmy is too complicated for most people, well that’s probably a good thing as it naturally filters out the people who only want to incite anger for upvotes. There’s no love on Reddits main subreddits anymore
Also it’s not that hard to understand anyway.
In terms of complexity, becoming conversant enough in how Lemmy works to do basic things feels on par with IRC. The expectations about how easy it is to hop on a service and start using it have shifted significantly because of the centralization of the past couple of decades, but the evidence available from comparing the tone of Reddit to here suggests the speed bump is helpful.
I disagree, it’s easy to say that a barrier to entry is good because it keeps out trolls and those that just want to insight hate, but really those people will find a way when anything gets popular enough to bother with. Meanwhile, that same barrier prevents a lot of underserved people joining in and they’re left to deal with the same toxic people we’re trying to avoid ourselves.
The centralised services didn’t succeed because they were centralised, they succeeded because they lowered the barrier to entry drastically. It’s a lot easier to do that when you’re centralised, but that’s something we’ll have to overcome if we want this community and others like it to succeed. Otherwise we’ll just slowly die inside our own echo chamber.
You’re right Lemmy is going to take a bit to get used to, but the kicker for me (and maybe a lot of people) is going to be at the end of the month when the 3rd party apps shut down. I’m either going to have to get used to something new either way, whether it be Lemmy or the official Reddit app and my understanding is that the official app is littered with ads and promotions that no one cares about so I probably won’t even bother.
Yeah. I’m not willing to use the official Reddit app. I tried for a day, and it was terrible. Using Lemmy with Jerboa feels natural, because the interface is very similar to the app I used for Reddit - Boost. There are communities I will miss, but it’s nice to actually see the fediverse start to grow, and participate in it. It’s hard to change from being a lurker to actually commenting, but the community feels more tight-knit.
I’m old and easily bamboozled by all this newfangled tech, and at first the whole fediverse thing was overwhelming. But eventually I realized it was not too different than an MMO’s multiple servers, and the idea of cross-realm and connected realms, and it functions not that much differently than a network mesh. You have multiple stand-alone nodes that are capable of cross-communications, so participate in a shared experience, and if one of the nodes goes down, the network will work around it.
It’s really not complicated once you give yourself time to think. And as long as the interface allows for the aggregation of random tidbits of data as we were accustomed to with Reddit, how the technology feeds that is not something the average user needs to worry about.
The only real difference between Reddit and Lemmy is that there is a bit more “hard wiring” that needs to be done by the user in order to set up a custom feed on Lemmy, but other than that, the user experience isn’t dreadfully different once the dust settles.
I appreciate talking to people from all walks, though. If a community wants to filter people it should be explicit and on purpose.
@CanadaPlus @Senseibu well I’m reading this on mastodon, so that’s pretty wild.
In general, it’s probably going to be difficult for a community to filter people out
I’ve been really enjoying the Mlem client on iOS as well. Definitely still has a long way to go but it’s a wonderful start
This iOS App Store link should automatically handle that: https://testflight.apple.com/join/xQfmkJhc
I’m really hoping that lemmy can see a larger uptick in engagement. I know I should be the change I want to see in the world. However the thing I miss the most is pointless arguments in the comments section. :D
That’s not an argument. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
Well I think it’s stupid and pointless that you miss pointless arguments. Are we doing it right?
Well I think it’s stupid and pointless that you miss pointless arguments. Are we doing it right?
Ohh for sure!
What you just want substance in your life? No debates over if Captain Picard could kick Luke Skywalkers ass? Everyone knows it’s Picard all the way. :D
To me Reddit was always the comments and less about the news story. The pulse of what was happening in your country, or town, or hobby, etc. I’m sure that will happen here on Lemmy too in time.
The Verge: Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’
There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.
That’s an absolutely tone deaf response from spez. The talking points are exactly what I expected and I’m not surprised, but man, whoever’s running PR at Reddit is really dropping the ball.
If they do IPO, anyone who buys into it wholeheartedly deserves the deep losses the company will incur long term - it seems no-one on Reddit’s leadership team, or anyone egging the company to float, understands what makes their own product tick.
Is he wrong though?
We all know that users are going to come flooding back as soon as the closed subs open again. Reddit has been through controversy after controversy and has only grown in size. The truth is that most people on Reddit don’t really care about third party apps, a lot didn’t even know they existed before the Apollo dev spilled the tea on his conversations with Reddit. Spez knows this and is counting on it.
For this protest to have any teeth at all, the protesting subs need to stay blacked out indefinitely until Reddit starts negotiating realistically, or they start hemorrhaging users to alternative platforms.
so - as one of those people who really didn’t know much about the 3rd party apps or even what the protest/blackout was, I was wishing for an alternative for quite some time now. Reddit has become an echo chamber where you’re downvoted for having your own opinion, no matter how vanilla the “dissenting” opinion is. The trolliing and constant arguing gets old after awhile, and I don’t think the current state of reddit is what the original intent of the platform ever was. This, for me, was why I gravitated toward Beehaw specifically. I’m not going back to Reddit. It reminds me of a playground full of bullies, itching for an argument. This platform is so much more my speed. And I feel like there are a pretty decent amount of people here who are in the same mind… for us, the alternative is welcome and Spez can wait til he retires for us to return because it’s not happening.
Yes… I feel the same way. We will see. The last big blowup there was not a place to go (I went to voat for awhile, but it was just another walled garden filled with a certain type of vibe I did not really like that much). Lemmy seems pretty good now. We all know that moderation and a heavy “Do not feed the trolls” has always been the rule all the way back to Usenet and the early internet. One reason I choose Behaw is they seem to believe in that basic philosophy. Plus federation, people that do not like that, they can go to instances where they are happy too. Seems win win.
The big counter issue is scale. There are some areas where Lemmy does not cover well. These tend to be technical areas like Law.
Wrong? No. But leadership is about communication and diplomacy as much as strategy. Short term gameplay aside, it doesn’t take much effort to pretend to attempt to placate power users and it doesn’t cost anything besides pride to do so. At least Reddit had a half-decent communication strategy with the Boston Bomber debacle - can’t say the same with this one.
In any case, whilst you won’t get the r/funny’s of Reddit going private indefinitely, you do have some big ones like r/iphone saying they’re blacking out immediately.
It’s pretty myopic of the leadership team to think that you shouldn’t at least attempt to make an user relations play here.
it seems no-one on Reddit’s leadership team, or anyone egging the company to float, understands what makes their own product tick.
Which is good news for us because even if this does blow over they will fuck up again and every time it happens we’ll profit from it in new users. Spez’s problem isn’t that his dream is unattainable, his problem is that the person having that dream is him.
I’m pretty sure his dream is just to make increasingly absurd amounts of money, every year more than the last: Line Go Up, forever. That dream is attainable in the short term, but utterly unattainable in the long term on a planet with finite resources.
He’s just in it for the $$$, regardless of how, not for any of the things that’re good about reddit. Someone who cared about reddit for any other reason wouldn’t do this to it.
It’s definitely a weird response, since it’s directed at employees I would have expected him to try to be reassuring without downplaying or even really mentioning the blackout.
Should have been easy to just say something bland like “we believe in the changes we are making and how they will make our company better. “
Everything passes. Including reddit. waves hands this is all just temporary.
Type O Negative - Everything Dies has surprisingly fitting lyrics for the search of people for a place to stay.
