87 points

If it weren’t for the blackout I:

1: Never would’ve heard of Lemmy

2: Likely not have tried it

3: Wouldn’t have had the inclination to stick around and learn

4: Started to like how Lemmy is laid out.

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37 points

Neccessity is the mother of federation!

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9 points

lol

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3 points

Yeah I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Definitely smaller, but I think that has its advantages.

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1 point

this is my favorite comment on here so far

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36 points

No mention of alternatives being in the spotlight that’s a bit too bad

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65 points

To be perfectly honest, Lemmy has had staggering growth regardless of the lack of media attention. And I’m not entirely certain that’s a bad thing.

Look at my home instance of lemmy.world, for example. When I joined pre-blackout, we had around 800 members. Now, two server upgrades later, we’re at nearly 18,000. If only a fraction of those newcomers stay, it’s still enough to jumpstart organic growth, even if it’s slow. And it gives us time to really develop.

Maybe that’s a glass-half-full outlook, but I’m optimistic.

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16 points

Similar at Beehaw. It’s going to be interesting to see how it all pans out

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14 points

Reddit often felt fragile to me. Like we have all the goods in the same basket and it’s just a matter of time before something bad happens. I’ve been here about 24 hours now and it’s starting to grow on me. Really hoping that we reach critical mass and I can truly ditch reddit.

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2 points

I had gotten in habit of clearing out my save list to save the links of comments or posts I liked and making sure to do a back up with archive.org, since comments disappearing was an issue before this.

Will do the same for some comments I had made before deleting it all.

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8 points

Same here, and I agree with you. I think this whole reddit fiasco will cause enough migration to sustain Lemmy and lead to organic growth over time. And I think this is best for Lemmy in the long term.

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7 points

Agreed. I was never on Digg, but was on reddit for several years before the Great Diaspora. I remember the epic web comics telling the story of how the Digg invasion happened. What some people forget to include in the retelling of those days is that there was not just one, isolated incident that led to Digg’s downfall.

Like all mass migrations in human history, there were multiple waves. The last was the biggest, but only because the previous waves had already gone out and created something new for the masses to move on to.

I think this will be similar. We’ll see people move back to Reddit in a couple of days, but in July the mobile apps shut down and another wave will likely be generated.

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35 points

I’m loving this non stop coverage of the blackout. It can’t be a good luck for investors interested in reddit

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1 point

Well this article was pretty much how Reddit has become a vital part of peoples daily life, so if I were an investor I’d view this article as reason to invest.

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31 points

BuzzFeed and other sites might have to write their own content. So many “articles” I come across are just reposts of Reddit comments.

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7 points

They could always pay the API fees and get ChatGPT to write some Reddit-like comments for them to report on.

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1 point

Honestly, it wouldn’t even surprise me if they did that

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21 points
*

I already had to use the cached version of a Reddit thread today to solve a technical issue I had with the rust compiler. There is so much valuable content there that is well indexed by search engines, let’s hope they don’t lock down the site even further to prevent AI’s from training on their data.

Although, in that case, Lemmy can take over as the searchable internet forum.

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8 points

If they actually want to restrict ai training, they also have to restrict search engines. I may be behind the times, but usually those kind of questions have gone to a stack overflow sort of site I would have thought.

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2 points

If they wanted to restrict AI Training they’ll need to prevent AI’s ability to view the website. Removing the API just removes the low bandwidth low impact manner of gathering the data. Scripts can just as easily HTTP scrape as they can use an API, but that’s a lot more resource intensive on Reddit’s side. Heck, this is the whole reason free public APIs became a thing in the first place.

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4 points

I wonder if the Internet Archive has preserved much of Reddit’s old posts and comments? No one seems to have mentioned it.

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6 points

I know there were at least a few projects not affiliated with IA that basically was a mirror copy of reddit. No idea what has happened to them at this point have not checked in a long time.

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1 point

I’m pretty sure it’s only a matter of time till an LLM can solve any sort of obscure compiler issue. If organic data growth happens outside of reddit, it’s not going to be of much use once search engines catch to those other sources.

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Technology

!technology@beehaw.org

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A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

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