dustedhands
You mean lemmy as an onion service? Onion addresses aren’t reachable unless you have Tor enabled. Won’t that create a parallel darknet fediverse on Tor network that doesn’t interact with clearnet fediverse?
I had a fight over this. For me, it was natural to have a distinction between chat, an instant, forgetful and private messaging platform, and websites, a more permanent and open repository.
Some disagreed hard and insisted discord was working just fine for them. Am I becoming the dinosaur?
Assuming they don’t mess with fediverse protocols, here’s hoping that I could interact with their users without using Meta’s proprietary apps, when it’s absolutely necessary. (This is separate from mastodon instances choosing to defederate from Meta servers)
If anyone is chiming in with “just plain don’t”, I’m talking of situations like Spanish speaking countries where every single fucking thing is done through whatsapp. Everything. There’s no avoiding it.
If I can use a self hosted instance and foss app to talk to the borg instead of their borgware, that’s a tiny point in my favor.
There are several points to be made:
The Old Reddit, whatever it means, is long gone forever. Aaron is gone. Spez does not care. No apologies or retracting will be made and that’s it.
Reddit must have calculated that there are enough ‘casual’ crowd (not a long timer, does not use or care about 3rd party apps or the old interface, comes for the quick laughs and watches ads) so they could withstand whatever pressure the ‘hard-core’ crowd (long timer, uses and cares about old UI and API changes, does not generate ad views in general, spends long hours in site) generates.
Reddit must have also considered the possibility of the second crowd simply going away. I suspect Spez or the investors simply does not give a damn about it. Ad revenues are everything and there’s a loud minority that threatens to leave? Why should they care, after all? All they see is a potential for “more” growth.
What they do and must care is the eventual entrance of a sizeable competition that eats into their revenues - less visitors mean less ad revenues. Lemmy and Fediverse, as much as I love it and will keep using it, is not that threat - yet.
What will probably happen is that the wider internet will label the riot (as of now) a massive failure, laugh at the “bravery” of slacktivism or whatever the latest meme can be slapped at.
Despite that, it should mark the emerging of a sustainable group of Reddit-like communities that could, in one day, become the competition Digg never thought they would face.
No, I don’t think Lemmy is perfect. I do have an issue with the dev’s political stance. But as long as they don’t become the Spez of what was supposed to be the Federation, and the software and the protocol and the community can sustain and rule themselves, things might be alright.
Reddit will eventually die, like many other internet websites. Perhaps not now. They won’t go out in a spectacular way the Digg v4 happened, but simply wither away like Facebook. But we have another home, and it’s all that matters.
Their gadgets built their fame because they just worked and were built like a tank. My grandparents had their stuff (from Goldstar era) and they still keep chugging.
None of this “as a service” bs will please the lifetime customers.