Lemmy, Mastodon and Kbin are the future of social media.
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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@twistedtxb @dirtmayor Completely agree. The fact that people from all over the web using different services can engage is amazing (hello from mastodon!)
Wait, does Lemmy federate with Mastodon? How does that work?
On mastodon search for the account @news@beehaw.org it will be this lemmy sub but in mastodon. Commenting on posts in mastodon will also comment on the lemmy thread.
Can you upvote or downvote posts through Mastodon? Or does that have to be done from a Lemmy instance?
@TexasCrowbarMassacre On the Mastodon side of things, we have a like button that's basically an upvote, but there's no equivalent of a downvote. So we can upvote, but not downvote.
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Capitalism is destroying the internet
Just the Internet, huh? I think it's ruining a few things. Especially when it's coupled w/ the forever growth mentality.
Oh for sure. It’s destroying society in large swaths.
Also the planet itself. The trees won't chop themselves down.
hello healthcare
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Unbridled capitalism is destroying ~~the internet~~ everything it touches.
When the ONLY motive of doing (or not doing) something is profit, things go to sit sooner or later. The example I often use is that we actually have enough food in the planet to feed everyone. We just throw a large portion of it away or destroy it, because in so many cases food is not made/grown to feed people, but to generate profits... Sad reality of late stage capitalism.
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It is but the FOSS community and projects like the Fediverse and increasing decentralization will go a long way to countering monetisation and the capitalist mindset
This is the best most comprehensive article written on this subject. And there is a link to every other article. As usual EFF does their homework and applies their judgement to describe perfectly:
The heart of this fight is for what Reddit’s CEO calls their “valuable corpus of data,” i.e. the user-made content on the company’s servers, and for who gets live off this digital commons. While Reddit provides essential infrastructural support, these community developers and moderators make the site worth visiting, and any worthwhile content is the fruit of their volunteer labor. It’s this labor and worker solidarity which gives users unique leverage over the platform, in contrast to past backlash to other platforms.
EFF doesn’t miss. Those guys gals and folks inbetween all rule. Fighting the good fight ✊
I'll soon need to back on some of my optional subscriptions, but the yearly donation to EFF is staying for sure
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The fediverse is the real Web3
I think it is more like the protoweb. How this works is more similar to BBSes, Usenet, IRC networks and the like from 30 years ago. Truly distributed networks with no central controlling mechanism and the systems communicate by simply agreeing on the technical protocol. That was what the internet was designed for i the first place. The last couple of decades where everything has been centralized to a few big megacorps is an abomination.
Since the fediverse unlike the rest of the web consists mostly of people hostile to aggressive monetisation there’s a built-in limit to how ‘capitalist’ (in the popular sense rather than the technical sense) an instance can be in terms of funding it. Instances will be forced to find alternative ways to pay the bills to the traditional ‘our users are the commodity we sell’ approach of the corporate social media platforms if they want to stick around for the long run which will be a fantastic thing for the web I think.
Everything old is new again. Time is a flat circle.
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I've been thinking we call it web4.0 to mess with the cryptobros. Idk if it is an accurate name, but I bet they would hate it.
web-4.0-rc1-final.2
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This, I did not know:
Details about Reddit’s API-specific costs were not shared, but it is worth noting that an API request is commonly no more burdensome to a server than an HTML request, i.e. visiting or scraping a web page. Having an API just makes it easier for developers to maintain their automated requests.
Yeah, there's nothing special about an API. It's just a shortcut for the app to use to get specific info from the server.
Even worse, their official app uses the same API -- and, by estimates, the Reddit app uses more calls than Apollo does.
They wanted more per user than they will ever make. A multiple of that, in fact.
Yep. This is Huffman having a tantrum because he found out someone is making enough money to live on with their coding, and his company isn't getting a slice.
RES is used by some significant percentage of Redditors and they take donations to fund their work. I'm willing to bet they're next on the chopping block of his tantrum.
To some extent, Reddit does get a slice - in the form of user engagement. User engagement is how they generate ad impressions, even if it's not from the users on the third party apps.
They COULD have simply put ads into the API, or made it a requirement. They didn't.
Their entire goal is to maximize "value" before their IPO. Control and number inflation. They don't care about the long term. Spez wants to cash out, and he doesn't care what it costs the company.
They COULD have simply put ads into the API, or made it a requirement. They didn’t.
OH, THIS THIS A BILLION TIMES THIS.
They shot themselves in the foot and are now angry about it.
Fortunately something like RES doesn't need Reddit's blessing to exist. A browser extension that rearranges information the browser has already downloaded (to massively oversimplify what RES is doing) doesn't need API access.
They could shut down old reddit but the only reason RES doesn't support new reddit is that it would require rewriting the whole thing. If that was the only option, someone would eventually do it.
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Scraping is more burdensome for the platform since that serves up images, JavaScript, and other files required to render a page. Maybe dying I tools can avoid this.
In general it's actually less burdensome.
Significantly so! An HTTP request probably means loading separate JS, CSS, and HTML documents. To say nothing of the weight of the requested page alone.
Greedy bastards
Sadly, Reddit has likely won the short-term battle. But hopefully, this Blackout raises awareness of the need for alternatives. Whether it be Lemmy/Kbin, some up-and-coming site like Squabbles or Tildes, or something not yet created, the seeds of migration off Reddit have been planted. If Reddit has such apathy for its communities pre-IPO, just imagine how bad it will be post-IPO when they are dealing with Wallstreet directly.
Reddit is only going to get worst over the next year. I came across this article a couple days ago while searching for early news coverage of the (then planned) blackout:
Reddit launches new ad products to boost conversions (archive.ph mirror)
Reddit has launched Contextual Keyword Targeting and Product Ads, to help advertisers reach new and valuable audiences.
The article reads like an ad, but what I got out of it was Reddit is going to have more tracking and intrusive advertising. Not a good experience.
Hey there! I'm a human, not an ad. Hello fellow human! I see you're interested in [contextual keyword targeting]. I think you might be {emotion4} to learn about this related thing, [ad for jesus]!
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Yeah a lot of naysayers had me convinced a short protest would do nothing, but you're right... This is about awareness. I've noticed particularly in the last year a downgrade in quality content on reddit and im sure others are noticing. Lemmy might not be ready yet, but it can be with some building inertia and useability improvements.
If they think people will left reddit in droves and reddit will shutdown during the blackout, yeah they are wrong. The blackout is about awareness, and during this short 48 hours, we already discovered swathes upon swathes of reddit alternatives, some are bigger than other, some are livelier than other, all within their communities yet federating each other, far from whateverthefuck spez is doing. And for that, the blackout is successful.
Lemmy or Kbin might be small, but hey, at least we can quite certain that we are human contributors, not bots.
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How and why did Reddit think copying Twitter's API pricing mistake was a good idea? And why charge Apollo $20 million?!
Like that's just a cricket bat to the face.
They're betting that the masses are too baked in to care. Reddit's CEO said it himself, they're counting on this to blow over. The best message you can send to them is to delete your reddit account and in the box that asks why you're doing so, tell them you're leaving for lemmy. Encourage your communities to follow you. This has happened one before with us old-timers who remember the Great Digg Migration. (Interesting internet history read if you have time.)
Probably analyzed the Twitter population before and after the API change, and it seems Twitter survived, so they wish to replicate this.
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Part of me thinks they were planning on using the high rate as a negotiation tactic. Ask for twice what you want, then back down to your actual number.
Then the Apollo dev "miscommunication" happened and things got ugly. Maybe they'll still back down, but maybe they'll die on that hill.
The other part of me thinks they just want to kill 3p apps and this is the easiest way to do that. Just price them out. They probably had some accountant or MBA crunch numbers on how many people would leave vs how much more revenue driving people to their ad ridden hellscape of an app...and figured it was worth the bad press.
Hell, they probably saw what Netflix just did with account sharing and were like "they got more subscribers!!!".
I think we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Reddit. It will be slow at first then all at once.
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Maybe there will be more people arriving because of the shoutout.
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