OneMoreB
the university I attended freshman year was ranked top 10 in the US for comp sci (at least as of 4 years ago), yet some of their account management stuff on their website wouldn’t be accessible after like 7pm. absolutely insane
They are encouraging users to send feedback on updates via their official feedback site, as well as telling users to engage with their official accounts on other social media platforms.
LinusTechTips just had an issue with this on WAN show tonight where Luke was trying to show a video on Twitter but he wasn’t signed in on his stream laptop and Linus was remote so he couldn’t share his screen.
Luckily the creator of the video they wanted to show had also posted it to YouTube so they were able to show it anyway, but it still disrupted the flow of the show and led them to not be able to use the platform as a news source.
Not to mention that many of these reddit articles say that the reason for the blackout is that reddit was simply going to put the API behind a paywall, not mentioning the insane rates they were going to charge. Most of the conversations I saw with 3rd party app developers were that they understood the need to charge for the API, the problem was that they wanted to charge an insane amount with very little notice. Kind of makes the protestors seem unreasonable or out of touch
The big issue would be to get everyone to sign up for something like that though. Since things have been running for a while without any sort of checks like that, it would be difficult to switch to that system now (do you merge communities with conflicting names, do you let them change their name, do you let them delete the community, etc.). Plus there’s the whole nature of the fediverse where every instance can be customized to the creator’s needs (so one instance might want to be on that database and others might) and it just becomes too much work to get everyone on board.
Maybe I’m wrong and someone will eventually implement something like this and people will want to use it, but I very much doubt it from what I’ve seen of the fediverse so far
- no, each server (kbin.social, fedia.io, lemmy.world, etc.) can have their own communities, since there is no centralized server that manages community names it would be impossible to track which servers already have a community with the same name
- yes, that’s the beauty of the fediverse! this post explains how you can do that. you can also view and interact with posts from other federated social media sites such as Mastodon if you are interested in that sort of thing