The blackouts will make no difference to Reddit's plans. The API charge will come in. The content creators and moderators will leave. The content will go stale. The smart shareholders will cash in early; the dumb ones will hang on for the prospect of a greater return which won't materialise. Once the content is stale, the readers and lurkers will leave. Reddit will become a has-been, a memorable item of internet history like so many other sites.
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2023
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Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
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Not just stale content. But with fewer mods, and the mods that do remain having fewer and less effective tools to do their job, there will be a lot more trolls and spam. The stale content is the lesser problem, really.
Hot take from me: They were planning to just add ads into the API, remove NSFW so that ad agencies don't get mad and maybe put a more modest premium to access the API.
They spark the outrage then basically paint users and subreddits that supported the blackout as 'heroes' when the walk back the changes partially and exclaim "We did it Reddit!". All when it would have been the plan from the get-go. The silence from their reasons behind this has me very suspicious of something like this.
I agree with you. Standard tactics with this sort of shit. Say you'll do something outrageous and when folks get mad enough roll back your plans enough that don't quite fuck over users as hard. Repeat ad infinitum. Users think they've won but in reality they've given up another inch.
This is the way it will go down.
It's a shame.
I do have to wonder if Reddit knows something we don't... This is.. wayyy too much to ignore. I assume they've done analysis of the worse cases and mass user departure. The only reason I can assume they're not backing down is due to the very high upfront costs of Reddit. Less users = less costs which theoretically means more profit. You have a very good point, and its something all Lemmy server owners need to be prepared for, which is a huge influx of users joining on the blackouts, even then, it may not be enough, unintentional DDOS attacks are still DDOS attacks. This is a golden opportunity of a lifetime for Lemmy, but I fear with even a 10th of Reddits current userbase, Lemmy admins won't be able to keep up... I feel for all the developers and admins that make Lemmy possible, and I really hope it goes well for everyone involved. Donate to server admins and the main project if you have a few dollars spare, or if anyone is comfortable with coding I'm sure they need some devs.
Reddit knows something we do know: that Lemmy is still young and still has some serious issues with scaling. By pulling the plug and dumping that many people on Lemmy now, all those people will be met with an error page instead of a viable Reddit alternative, driving them back to Reddit.
I can only hope it doesn't actually play out like this…
This was my initial experience. Tried Lemmy, it wouldn't let me sign up. Back to reddit. Tried again a day later (yesterday) on a different instance and it worked. People who aren't so persistent might not try again though 🤷♂️
Reddit knows they have sudo access, and that ultimately the upset users are not that large, just fairly vocal, and won't miss them. They're probably planning to let this play out and know they can force the subs open again with new moderators if it comes to it. I think they're banking on most users merely being annoyed that their favorite subs are closed for a day and then forgetting all about it.
I think they’re banking on most users merely being annoyed that their favorite subs are closed for a day and then forgetting all about it.
if they are it's a good approach: look no further than climate protests for how people get when they are even mildly inconvenienced even though it's the literal existence of the planet we're talking about there. a lot of ordinary people love protest--as long as it literally never affects them in any way, and they never have to see it or hear about it. they're probably not going to like it when it's something this... banal.
I hate to say this but Lemmy is way less user friendly than Reddit. I doubt anything close to 10% of reddit will come over here. This site should focus on improving new user acquisition.
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Not a good name for a social media site. Google/Youtube searching "Lemmy" just gives results for a guitarist
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The average joe doesn't understand how federation works
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You have to decide which place to make an account
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You have to write an essay to join (I've seen people complain about this)
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The top instances look very political/left wing
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If you're persistent, educate yourself, and make it through the process, you can join a site with ~1000 active users.
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Following remote communities is unintuitive. You have to search the link from your instance to subscribe to another instance (e.g., if your account is on beehaw, you have to search !gaming@lemmy.ml. You can't click their subscribe button on lemmy.ml.)
You and I know that different instances of Lemmy are mutually accessible and so #3 and #5 are not a problem. But for the uneducated all the above are significant barriers for entry/retention.
"just gives results... for a.. guitarist."
lol! Lemmy was mind-blowing amazing and I'm not at all surprised he's all over the top results. I get your point though and def not trying to disparage you :)
I'm more into black/death metal so I'm not too versed on Motorhead. But I hear Lemmy was the GOAT
#1 Same with a lot of new social media, discord actually meant something different before 2015
#2 They don't need to at a technical level
#3 If you find it challenging to decide which server to join then I really don't know what to tell you. Its a small barrier to entry and objectively a good thing. An small IQ test of sorts.
#4 I'd imagine this is for spam / bot protection, and it may change in the future. I kinda like it, it keeps a lot of toxic users / trolls out. Sure the community is smaller but its more inviting for those that took the time.
#5 How is that different from reddit? View r/all at anytime and it was composed of left wing articles and users.
#6 Not 100% sure what your arguing here
#7 I actually find the idea of similar communities on different instances confusing (eg. !memes@lemmy.ml & !memes@beehaw)
edit: spelling
edit 2: it may be a little confusing to users that all servers can talk to eachother through federation so thats probably what confuses people. This could be explained better on the join-lemmy webpage. either way this will probably be similar to mastadon in terms of how it'll go down, lots of users join, instances have a hard time keeping up at first, then they stabilize.
Personally I think the requirement to explain why you want to join a lemmy instance is 100% brilliant. If you can answer coherently you're clearly not a robot, and probably don't intend to spam.
The text field itself doesn't require any minimum or maximum character counts so there's no pressure to be wordy. In fact I think those who read that information appreciates when you can achieve some brevity but still communicate clearly in your own words why you're signing up.
Additionally different instances have different priorities and needs; so I suspect they can ask for even more information or writing samples if needed; or ask for as little as possible to discourage users from being too crazy.
You're right, and the manual signups should help slow the flood of users.
100% agree, I kinda hope they keep it in a way because its probably better than most standard captchas.
Like I said, #3 and #5 aren't a problem if you know about federation. But without understanding the concept of federation you might have some misunderstandings about Lemmy. For example, you might think that when you sign up for an instance you can only see communities on that instance. So the choice of instance becomes very important. Alternatively, you might think that all instances are automatically connected. So you might not know that instance admins can block other instances (like how beehaw blocks lemmygrad). Then, because you want nothing to do with lemmygrad, you might decide not to be a part of Lemmy.
By point #6, I just meant to say that Lemmy is a much smaller community than redditors are used to.
Also, as an addendum, not all of these are problems for me. Clearly, I'm using Lemmy so I made it past these hurdles lol. But, yeah, some people are going to see that you have to write an essay and just nope outta here. Some of those people aren't toxic, they're just lazy. And, in many ways, Lemmy forces you to go that extra mile which is going to hurt its user growth.
Yes and thats true aswell, some instances aren't connected to one another so that might be an issue for someone just picking a random instance. The solution is quite simple though, make it clear in the join-lemmy page the federation status, or have a link to all the banned instances the admins have put in place. Overall I'm still very hopeful and worried about the coming days, this community has already grown but its not over yet.
I do have to wonder if Reddit knows something we don’t…
I'm hoping for the best, but fearing the worst as far as Reddit goes. I wouldn't be surprised if they did the math and just don't care.
If lemmy keeps growing, and I can source a cozy one stop spot for hentai and memes, I'll nuke my 11 year reddit account.
Reddit might nuke the hentai subs long before then (since they're going public). Hell, Imgur just deleted all NSFW content (after the creator sold it)
That's why I'm here, patiently waiting.
I saw one of the Lemmy devs say they're a little unprepared cause they're working on a pretty big performance overhaul still.
Timing is critical with these kind of migrations and if a lot of people flock to Lemmy just to have it croak at the new load it could really turn people off of Lemmy before they can even try it
Reddit knows something we don’t
they know that they can circumvent moderators' lockdown and make subreddits public at will and sack the mods who don't agree with the change, and they'll still have tons of people willing become a moderator for the sense of pride and accomplishment that you get from ruling your tiny little castle.
I've got my popcorn ready for whatever happens down there.
Me too, here we go!
popcorn tastes good.
Honestly, I want Reddit to fail altogether and have people flood into Lemmy by hosting their own instances. It's like ripping off the band-aid, it's just better to get on with it.
My account is 17 years old and predates the first digg migration (before the giant digg v4). It’s been a downhill run for a while but sometime after the Boston bombing debacle it’s seemed much more aggressively moderated and curated, much less “free” and less tolerant of opinions or thoughts that fall outside of the “hive mind”.
I use it less and less anyway. I get that the API was abused to violate folks privacy wishes(ie:pushshift ) and feed larger corps coffers with ad data. And I get that a response is to ad some charge. But their general direction has seemed to be circling a toilet so to speak
It always felt to me like there was just a huge shift in the entire reddit culture. At some point, everything changed and it was no longer the same. The users all got worse, the moderation got worse, reddits decision making got worse. The site is nothing like it was when I joined in 2013.
Agree. But I can’t find a specific inflection point. I still recall one of my first comments was some low effort smarmy joke that would engender upvotes on digg, and thus must have been good for Reddit. And the only response was something like “we don’t really do that here bud”
And they were right. The culture was much closer to say news.ycombinatir.com now, but with much more open subject matter.
I do know they changed how quickly things can be put on the front page after Boston. And then clearly there were things that were selectively placed there and suddenly certain, if not most subreddits couldn’t be on the front page. So that’s the main place I can point to that changed the type of content and culture from one of a popular vote to a more delayed and curated narrative.
I’m okay with it dying at this point.
I think this will raise awareness but I'm skeptical that reddit will change their plan. I think that whatever we see from them in the future will be what they planned all along. Even if they lower the API data price, they probably planned to do that anyway (anticipating the backlash to their bullshit). Not to mention NSFW content is at risk.
Seconded on this.
I'm optimistic it will get the people at Reddit who need to see how it will affect people to see what exactly is happening.
But the realist in me says they've bean-counted how many people will leave or migrate to their default apps and are willing to eat that cost back when they bring out the IPO.
So is there any way for me to help in terms of load distribution? Still figuring out this federated stuff.
Let's say beehaw for example.
I don't think (?) I want to create my own instance to moderate or whatever, but am I able to create an instance which is like a node to help with load/volume?
Or is that a matter of beehaw needing beefier servers/bandwidth? Meaning it comes down to financial contribution (which I've already set a monthly donation for).
If you introduce people to Lemmy, direct them to smaller instances to sign up on.
Only thing I'll say is you still have to pick carefully cause you're also picking a mod/admin team.
Not sure I'd say "careful"... more of "don't get too comfortable". As the dust clears I'd expect some/many of the new instances to shutdown. Likely due to hitting server resource limits, or admin motivation limits :)
Yeah there's a bunch. See https://join-lemmy.org/instances and there are several there to choose from.
The last reddit hug of death?
Most of the subs I follow now are planning a black out. Several of them have implied or even outright said they'll make it indefinite unless Reddit changes their plan
Absolutely. I joined lemmy.ca months ago before beehaw because I got bored of waiting for Reddit's potato to start working again. With a major portion of Reddit forced down in solidarity for two days, I think many will similarly have a gander at lemmy while they wait for any move from Reddit.
I'm hoping if our part of the Fediverse can ride that wave without crashing too much, Lemmy instances all over will explode in popularity starting the 12th. If the admins are trying to migrate to a better scalable or better value platform (@alyaza), they should do it before then. Other instances should request funding in preparation as well..
Honestly, with VC money at stake, it would surprise me if there wasn't a team of people already hired to degrade and interfere with a mass migration to Lemmy.
@mrcleansocks if Lemmy alone cannot take the flow (although more and more instances are set up, so the impact should be aleviated), people can also go to kbin or (if someone is okay with having a more spartan alternative) to Lotide.
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