Funwayguy

They can try but without the moderation tools at the core of the issue, the subs will be inundated with bot spam till it dies. There will never be enough admins with free time to replace all the unpaid moderators let alone their knowledge. Not to mention doing a hostile takeover of subs without any understanding of each community’s values will serve only to piss off more people.

Besides cashing out a dying platform, there is no winning for Reddit if they keep this up.

I’d be interested in something like a lightweight CDN/replication with OAuth2 for logging into other instances. Each instance ‘replicates’ your original account but isn’t itself the master. One can be promoted to master in the event of an outage effectively migrating your account.

Would make for some difficult security considerations given a rogue instance could attempt to hijack authority.

It’s the new rise of CEOs and millionaires seeking to milk the internet to the last fractional dime. Leave morals and critical thinking at the door. Every major company is doing this now, shutting out everything even remotely capable of being scraped into a LLM and paywalling what used to be free to satisfy post-covid shareholders. Accessibility be damned, line must go up.

Beyond that we have Google crippling the Android and Chromium open source code, Youtube blocking user accounts using adblock, Twitch banning sponsor spots who sidestep their pockets, and of course all of them are doubling down on AI with massive amounts of corporate sponsored IP theft and data laundering on an incompressible scale, suffocating any human content (see the Amazon book crisis).

The pandemic really did accelerate the enshittification of everything after it pushed everyone into online ecosystems. Shareholders want to keep that market and turn all that captured data into profit, especially in the face of the uprising of LLMs.

Unfortunately one major PR problem with the dismantling of those entrenched ecosystems is explaining that the Fediverse is fundamentally NOT the scam infested Web3 envisioned by absolutionist techbros. Even the word ‘decentralised’ has negative connotations now. We need a coordinated marketing/narrative push (compare it to email servers for the boomer managers) and offer pre-built Docker images for companies to host. That could really change the tide of things when LTS builds exist with little to no barrier to entry. Sell the prospect of corporate PR departments controlling their own first party news published direct to reader’s feeds with no loss in moderation control on either side. It would be a huge boon for everyone.

TLDR: Federated services very much could be the next era but we still need much more people, including companies, on board to reach critical mass.

Yup. The top spots are absolutely flooded with AI garbage and it is nigh impossible to have any meaningful visibility. In a related issue, there are writers getting scammed by ‘artists’ submitting AI artwork for their commissioned covers which subsequently fucks the copyrights with severe cost to reprint all of the books. Shit is fucked for anyone in any creative field right now.

That basically sums up everything that comes out of the emerald baby’s fanciful brain farts. A walking joke that has gone on so long that the sad manchild has to do ever more expensive corporate stunts mixed with decade-old cringe humour to stay relevant. After all the shit he’s pulled lately, I’m not even surprised any more.

Unfortunately that hasn’t been unique to Reddit. Outrage, hate, and conspiracies generate clicks and engagement on platforms. Recent events within the last decade gave rise to a lot of coordinated hate campaigns. User created subreddits were a double edge sword for this in both being able to filter out these groups but also giving them their own echo chambers to congregate and embolden one another. The transition from liberal freedom of speech to absolutionist right to hatred made social media companies millions simultaneously in accepting money to promote controversial topics and harvesting the resulting outrage on their platforms. Reddit and their staff effectively became one of many internet war profiteers giving all sides bases of operations.

To end on a semi-positive note, with the rise of federated services, instances may still give these extremists places to seethe but they can at least be ‘sanctioned’ or defederated from the rest of the larger fediverse very easily.

The longer you think about that scenario the more fucked up it gets. Google argues that it’s a problem of scale, which is outrageously BS when you consider Google of all companies let their own account system be easily botted, and don’t use any of the ludicrous number analytical tools purpose built for detecting spam trends (3rd parties use them all the time to spot political spam).

This is probably cooked up by the same people who conducted massive invasions of privacy during the pandemic by demanding live feeds and 360 scans of student’s private rooms. The worst part about this is the false positives could be intentionally faked to fail or expel ‘undesirable’ students with little or no evidence. It’s utterly fucked from all sides.

You say that but I fully believe Meta will tamper with their instance to push external users to sign up in order to engage with anything, while limiting the ability for them to get back out, effectively aiming to become the de-facto ‘center’ of the fediverse.