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Reddit down amid major protest (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by NEWS@lemmy.world to c/news@beehaw.org

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Reddit has stopped working for millions of users around the world.

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/reddit-down-subreddits-protest-not-working-b2356013.html

The mass outage comes amid a major boycott from thousands of the site’s administrators, who are protessting new changes to the platform.

On 12 June, popular sub-Reddits like r/videos and r/bestof went dark in retaliation to proposed API (Application Programming Interface) charges for third-party app developers.

Among the apps impacted by the new pricing is popular iOS app Apollo, which announced last week that it was unable to afford the new costs and would be shutting down.

Apollo CEO Christian Selig claimed that Reddit would charge up to $20 million per year in order to operate, prompting the mass protest from Reddit communities.

In a Q&A session on Reddit on Friday, the site’s CEO Steve Huffman defended the new pricing.

“Some apps such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync have decided this pricing doesn’t work for their businesses and will close before pricing goes into effect,” said Mr Huffman, who goes by the Reddit username u/spez.

“For the other apps, we will continue talking. We acknowledge that the timeline we gave was tight; we are happy to engage with folks who want to work with us.”

In response to the latest outage, one Reddit user wrote on Twitter: “Spez, YOU broke Reddit.”

Website health monitor DownDetector registered more than 7,000 outage reports for Reddit on Monday.

Some users were greeted with the message: “Something went wrong. Just don’t panic.”

Others received an error warning that stated: “Our CDN [content delivery network] was unable to reach our servers.”

Update: Seems to be resolved for most users

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[–] dap@lemmy.onlylans.io 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Same. Projects like Lemmy are pretty slick, I just hope that the perceived barrier to entry due to the decentralized nature of the Fediverse won't keep people from joining. There needs to be a "critical mass" of users to make a platform successful and engaging. Hopefully that happens to Lemmy due to the Reddit API fiasco.

[–] blindsight@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

I think that's already happened, for mainstream topics anyway.

Now, we're on the small side of a balance between small and large; as the Fediverse grows, it can support increasingly niche communities but, on the flip side, the less cohesive the userbase (and thus the harder to maintain culture) and the more attractive the platform becomes for spammers, trolls, and other malicious parties.

I think the technological barriers may be a good thing as it forces a minimum level of effort to get started. Just like private trackers are almost universally "safer" than public trackers since it takes some actual effort to get in.