Same. It got me to oficially jump over to Lemmy. Reddits been veering downhill and always wanted an alternative. Kind of glad all this got more people to Lemmy etc.
I’m with you. We need to publicize, though. It would be helpful if there was a concerted effort around a transitional choice. Even better if subreddit admins replicate communities and content over here. Also, I kept my Reddit username - wonder how many others did the same?
Yeah but if we don't see a community/magazine we want (that exists on reddit), do we take it upon ourselves to start it or do we wait for the mods of the reddit sub to create it?
There's no guarantee they're going to come over, so I'd say make it yourself. You can always add them in the future if they do make the switch and still want to be a mod.
I for one had modded for r/beards and r/moustache and decided to make a moustache community over on lemmy.ml. Anyone is welcome to join!! Moustache community on Lemmy.
So far I'm in the wait and see camp, especially until the apps actually shut down on the 30th. In an optimistic view where this site takes off (I don't even know what that means in a federated situation. Aren't the instances fracturing communities? Posts transfer but it doesn't seem comments do...), moderation of huge magazines would be incredibly time consuming and difficult, I imagine.
Admittedly the system is a bit confusing as far as UX goes. I’m a fairly nerdy gal and am familiar with servers and software packages and “instances”, and I’m still having issues wrapping my head around the UX.
For example. I’m on Kbin, federated with Lemmy instances. Which is working obviously. But how do I go about discovery of networks and instances and communities within those instances from Kbin? That seems possible but to an uninitiated user, not exactly the simplest thing. None of this is a dealbreaker for me, but what about others? Am I the only one not quite understanding how it all slots together interface wise?
No, you are definitely not the only one. I explored this style of social media for the first time several months ago because of what was going on with Twitter.
I got confused pretty quickly and ultimately decided it would be easier to just quit Twitter and use Reddit only, even though I would be giving up things I liked about Twitter.
But now we're here, so I'm trying again. Still confused tho
Same here! Just so I understand, it doesn't matter if you choose kbin or Lemmy, the content is the same? What about Mastadon? Is that also combined into this same network?
They all implement ActivityPub which is just the protocol used to move everyone's posts and such around to any other server that's supposed to receive it. So yeah, you can use Mastodon to follow Lemmy or kbin magazines. You can also do the opposite where you follow Mastodon users from Lemmy/kbin. As long as the blog uses ActivityPub federation, you can ingest that content in to whatever other compatible service you want.
I will say things get a little weird if you follow on a service that presents that information in a drastically different way, but it is doable.
And not just Lemmy or Kbin. You could follow videos from Peertube, pictures from Pixelfed, and soon even articles from WordPress and Tumblr - and you will be able to post comments to any of them.
I feel old and out of touch. 15 years of being Reddit only, and now I have no idea what half of those words mean or how these services work. Hah, time to do some learning again
I landed on lemmy first, then I found out about kbin over there. I'm glad for the Fediverse because I don't have to lose the ability to continue to participate in the community and not be tied to one website. Now, if they could figure a way to import the subscribed list from my old account, that would be icing on the cake.
I just hope there is any fallout from this. I really hope start mass migrating off reddit, and people don't begrudgingly return a couple days after all of this dies down
I very much doubt there will be.
They have crunched the numbers, they know they can weather this storm.
At the end of the day there will still be natural growth of reddit via people hearing about it and just grabbing the official apps from stores. A lot of techy types will leave, but they haven't been the driving force behind reddit for a long time.
Reddit will just start heading more towards influencer style content and less of the content that originally built the platform.
My guess is that influencer style content is more profitable and less hazardous for them to host anyway.
I am personally leaving, friends/family also leaving. And Im blocking it on my network, and we got a "lets do it" to block it on our corporate network (1900+ employees). But everyone said "likely leaving". Kbin maybe about to get the hug of death! May launch a selfhosters one! Lets do this
I created my account here because of this. Was on Reddit for over ten years. Won’t be using Reddit after June 30th. Trying to figure out what to do with the (smaller, but over 150k subs) subs I moderate now then I’m out.
A ‘small’ portion of the Reddit community used Apollo & RIF (and other third party apps), but those were the power users and mods.
Thing is, I'm kind of settled with the idea that Reddit will still win out monetarily with this. 99% of users are going to take the path of least resistance, which is kinda expected.
So my goal is more around just having a good conversational community, and I kinda like the change in pace now that I'm using alternatives. I don't really focus on "Reddit losing". I just like having a good place to chat. It might be funny to see if they end up reversing course, but I'm not losing sleep on that turnout.
I don't know where reddit's going from this, but I agree that the main focus should be what happens here. Seems like it gave the userbase a nice boost, and that's mostly it.
Reddit won't come out on top. They'll survive, but it's going to hurt them. They seem to have pissed off most communities on the site. It's the largest protest they've ever had.
Reddit doesn’t run a profit yet, so all they need to achieve is enough to get into the black. Like Twitter, Reddit I don’t think will crash and burn but the quality will drop dramatically. Reddit doesn’t care about quality long as there’s enough users on the site to make the paid ads have value. In the short term I think they’ll succeed in that but it’s going to turn into a cesspool.
But if those up for actual conversation and vaguely respectful debate come over here & leave the trolls and the karma farmers with Spez then that’s a great result!
It's just a question of if it sticks or not. Will people complain and mods relent or admins intervene and oust mod teams for a new batch of dummies? I feel the answer is yes.
I really hope this doesn't happen, but I fear the same. Often these corpos will just bet on people being lazy, forgetting how bad the scandal was after a few weeks/months, and just roll over for them.
I just hope Reddit utterly collapses as a message to the wider industry, but I doubt it will and even if it did, I think the message would likely fall on deaf ears.
Same. We have seen nothing but reddit shitting the bed. If people are still staying everything, they're not as likely to leave. If this doesn't do it, then that's that. The subs I would consider stating for are dead. Emulation has a post from yesterday, and then 5 days ago. EmulationOnAndroid is still private. Sad to see the community not there anymore, since it was a great way to keep up with everything that was going on, but if they don't pick up here I'll just watch some YouTubers and move on.
That is my feeling. I want Lemmy to be good, so I hope a lot of quality users jump ship from Reddit, but if Reddit retains the millions of passive users, then I’m happy for Reddit to keep them. One part of Reddit’s issue was the diluted quality of posts and comments, so let it continue to exist to filter people who want that experience. ___
Yeah it sounds harsh but once a subreddit got above 100k its quality inevitably took a nose dive unless this was actively moderated against which it usually wasn’t. Lurkers are fine in general but when the whole platform is mostly lurkers looking to doomscroll TikTok style rather the lurkers wanting to read (and upvote) decent high-effort content it all goes down the pan pretty quickly.
If Reddit’s role in the Fediverse is as a great big sponge to soak up the passive users who just want quick content then long live Reddit! Spez staying on as CEO and increasingly zombifying the platform is actually great for us because it will drive active users here and keep the passive users on Reddit.
Reddit sheds a few million of its active users but the API changes and death of third-party apps don’t completely kill the site because now it’s pretty mainstream and a lot of people actually don’t give a shit about Apollo, RIF, etc.
A few million is plenty to make lemmy a comparable community. As that continues more and more people who didn't move in previous years will move now, because there are enough people here to make it worthwhile.
I think the main difficulty of a site replacing Reddit is that Reddit clones are now a-dime-a-dozen.
Which makes a federated system like lemmy even more competitive.
I've given lemmy a try 3-4 times over the last couple years. And I think that presently it is getting fairly close to a big enough crowd that is very usable and is comparable to what reddit was like in 2008 when I switched from Digg.
To be honest. Lemmy doesn't need to out compete reddit or whoever. It just needs to be competitive. Not having the brain dead mainstream masses over here is not a loss. However, people have always moved to the platform with more liberty when most other aspects are the same. Otherwise reddit would never have been a thing. Most people were over at Digg for a reason. They only moved to reddit when Digg gave them enough reasons to leave.
Spez will forcibly depose and ban moderators who participate in the blackout and install his own yes-men to reopen these communities. A lot of power users will fold and jump back to Reddit's side, out of fear that they'll lose their foothold on the site.
Communities like /r/RedditAlternatives will be banned by the admins, along with the communities of any alternative social media platforms that are in direct competition with Reddit. Some subreddits focused around Lemmy instances have already been purged by the admins and I see them quadrupling down on this.
Reddit sheds a few million of its active users but the API changes and death of third-party apps don't completely kill the site because now it's pretty mainstream and a lot of people actually don't give a shit about Apollo, RIF, etc. I think the main difficulty of a site replacing Reddit is that Reddit clones are now a-dime-a-dozen.
Porn-focused communities decide to leave the site and start their own website (perhaps a Lemmy instance or a standalone site that aims to compete with places like Fansly or OnlyFans), because they see the exclusion of NSFW material from the API is a precursor to a total porn-ban.
Reddit announces its IPO and still raises a lot of capital.
No, but are power users necessary? Most of the front page subreddits are just "post whatever you want here" and they have more than enough 14 year old posters to keep the site saturated.
Power users are more likely to use more server resources and less likely to see ads. They probably specifically do not want them.
The glory days of the site are quite behind it. And that's not just me being nostalgic or moody about the current climate. Reddit had an enormous influx of Facebook and Instagram users over the years and the content started to reflect that. It's specifically apparent on the default pages with looser rule-sets like r/Pics. Like, selfies without context became normalized.
That's a good point. I associate power users with niche subjects and generally higher quality posts, so I'm interested to have that demographic move here. I don't really care about front page content, so maybe it's win-win then :D
There are about 13k moderators participating in the blackout IIRC - I don't think reddit will have the resources or the community goodwill to take over all of the major subs
Just used redact.dev and save yourself the time. it'll scramble all your comments and delete them, ruining their data haarvesting sales potential or AI scrapability.
The situation is now as it is, and we can no longer change it. Reddit has often made itself unpopular in the past with wrong decisions in the community. But this time I think they have gone too far and won't get away with this so easily. Maybe they are going to kill their own product very soon.
We all fully understand that this is a business that needs to make a profit, so they can't make their APIs totally free for everyone. Running such a service costs a lot of money indeed.
But doing so at the expense of the third-party apps that made Reddit the popular platform it is today for end users in the first place is not a smart move at all. Hands down, Reddit has not been able to bring its platform up to modern technical standards for years. Not to mention that they are not able to provide a decent web and mobile UI to their users. This is exactly the job that third-party apps are currently taking over.
What I would have done instead of Reddit is not to wipe out the very apps that keep my platform alive and make it an enjoyable experience for my end-users - but instead support those apps as much as I could. Why not provide those apps completely free API access and let the Reddit users bring their own API-access keys into those apps? Make a free Reddit tier plan which allows users to browse Reddit for free. As soon as a Reddit user wants to write posts or comments, let them pay a little monthly fee (lets say $2). Not only would that solve the problem for Reddit how to make more money without making small app developers pay, it would also significantly improve the quality of the content on the platform since it would lock out all the trolls and spammers from posting their shitty stuff.
Why do you think that? Apollo users are already paying subscription fees to the app developer right now (me included). And as long as you are just a lurker, access could still be free. Sure not everyone is willing to pay $2, but if just 1/3 of all current Reddit users would do, that’s a ton of money - much more than they would ever get from the app developers paying for API requests.
Apollo users that believe in the project would probably be way more willing to pay a small indie dev compared to a burgeoning wannabe megacorp. Christian said refunding half of the year for his yearly subs would cost him a quarter mil (half of the 500k he made off those subs this year) which is nuts but like the man made a good app. I paid for the one time premium because I used it so much and I was impressed.
Yes, while Apollo is generally a free app, it has a premium subscription for users, providing advanced features like push notifications and other stuff. Since the app developers have to run their own backend to make those features work, users have to pay a small fee (what is totally OK for me since it is such a great app and I liked to support the developer this way).
You are right that this just solves a small part of the problem. If the numbers I have seen are correct, the API calls from all those mobile apps just make up a small number from the overall. A huge issue seem to be all those search engines and AI dudes feeding their stuff with data from Reddit (🫣 why would someone want to do this...). For those, I think it is still fair to let them pay per API request. So they could just give regular users a large amount of API request and force commercial users who want to scrape content with their bots to have an enterprise business plan and pay per API usage.
Am I the only one who doesn't get all the outrage? They are a private company with a CEO and investors and that's their data. There was never any promise to be a community effort. Why should they let Apollo etc make money out of their data.
And before people say "it's NOT their data! Users cre it" - yeah it's user generated data, which users then donate to Reddit in exchange for reach and publishing tools.
It would be different if it was on the fediverse, which has totally different premises. But Reddit is a private company and eventually they would have to turn a profit. That was always on the cards.
Of course Reddit is allowed to do this, but surely you understand why this move is so unpopular. It's bad for users, and the way they pushed it was dishonest and generally poor.
I don't think anyone who understands the issue is complaining about them monetising. People know it costs a ton to maintain the infrastructure. That's not the point.
people don't mind TPAs are billed, but the pricing is a thinly veiled attempt at pretending that they don't want to completely eliminate TPAs. People would have been fine if the pricing is reasonable. They don't like it when you try to pull a fast one over them.
their own application is bad. There's no way around it. From accessibility to mod tools.
they have promised to focus on the above points for years now, and there's still almost no improvement. People don't trust them anymore.
spez's recent comments against the Apollo dev are blatant lies and it only fuelled the outrage. Unfortunately for him, the Apollo dev legally recorded the conversation.
they do own the data, but it's still the users who create them. If you treat the people who create content for you like trash, expect backlash. This happens on many private companies, not only reddit.
There's more, but I'm out right now so I can't focus much. Basically, if your content is from the users, you should take care of the users and people running your site.
The outrage has a few different angles, but one key theme is that Reddit weren't exactly forthcoming with specifics around pricing information until very recently, leaving 3rd party Devs little time to negotiate a better price or actually develop the changes required to play along.
Yes, Reddit should be able to charge for their API, as a commercial business. But it's the approach taken, the short self imposed timelines and artificial pressures applied that have angered the Devs, taking the apps offline and upsetting the users
It seems pretty obvious that they are trying to push out 3rd party apps, just like all the other platforms are doing. I understand why the devs are fuming, but I don't particularly care TBH. Besides the fact that we don't know what those devs are doing with our location + sensor data they are constantly collecting, they were always running on borrowed time. They made their money, now it's time to pivot to something else, like any other business.
As somebody who uses the official Reddit app (Android), it's complete dog shit and ridden with bugs. Tapping links will often direct you to a completely different thread, videos often don't play or if they do, audio is disabled, sometimes comment threads don't load at all, etc. I would 100% recommend using a third-party app for browsing Reddit and the only reason I ditched BaconReader was because I had some compatibility issues a few years ago.
If the official app wasn't a vastly inferior alternative to browsing the site and like a worse version of New Reddit, a lot of people would be less pissed off at Spez over this.
Oh don't take me wrong, I am not saying they are handling this well. Specifically on the app, it's idiotic to force people off unofficial apps without the official app being if not better at least comparable in quality. That's why I use the web version - that and the fact I don't want apps collecting location and sensor data as I go about my day. I am not sure why people assume the Apollo devs are trustworthy and are not selling your data like everyone else does.
It would definitely be great, but I was unaware until this thread that the premium version of Apollo is a paid subscription, which is a no-go for me. I'll pay money for an app like that once, never a subscription.
I get that this largely an unpopular opinion, and ultimately, you have to do you, but whether or not an app is first party, third party, or a cobbled together black market party, software development for any service will have to be ongoing until the heat death of the universe or until the service stops functioning.
There’s no getting around that. Anything that realistically touches the web/internet will need to be maintained. It’s the reality of software and security. It may not always require a $10/mo plan, but things are not free. Where seeing the death of the web as a lot of us knew it because funding is finally drying up and companies have to show value, or all of it goes away.
To be clear - I think what Reddit is doing is catastrophically bad; there are ways they could monetize third party apps, they just don’t want to. But to a lot of people who don’t necessarily follow development, it’s difficult to understand how it quickly can consume all of your time. And you’re either paying for it, you are the product, or you’re paying for it with your time (volunteering on open source software).
I understand what you're saying. Like I said, I have no problem paying for software, but the subscription model for EVERYTHING is getting ridiculous. I can't keep track of the subscriptions I have now, let alone add more. I buy apps regularly. If I have to start paying a subscription to for all of my apps I'll go back to a flip phone.
The problem is really the internet part of it. It’s one thing when you’re talking like “a calculator” app - it’s different when you’re talking about an app that makes api calls to a server. Both ends of that aren’t static.
I get subscription overload is a thing - but the biggest problem too is that the platform owners don’t even give you the capability as an app owner to “sell” an upgrade like in the olden days.
I think a solid question to ask, all of this said, is why every subscription has to be $10-20. They don’t, and certainly some part of that is definitely greed.
That AMA was honestly hilarious... I don't know what i actually expected, but this was better. Not only did the CEO go after Christian in the comments, but he also admitted that reddit isn't profitable, lol. This may not seal the deal for reddit, but i wouldn;t be surprised if spez was out of there just based on this PR disaster.
I don’t understand what it was he hoped to accomplish with it. Nothing new was stated and all it did was make things worse. It was worse than half assed too.
I don’t think it was a secret that reddit wasn’t profitable yet, but the way that was posted twisted as a nasty way to take a jab at 3rd party apps was awful.
I mean, have a proper answer ready. Most people would absolutely understand that as a company they need to be “profit driven” to become sustainable as long as they had really open & honest communication with as much notice as possible about changes.
There seems to be this counterproductive instinct by (some) CEOs to just keep silent.. it’s not the screw ups that sink you.. it’s the lack of communication on it that does. This AMA somehow actually managed to make it even worse by pretending to be ready to talk and then responding with this kind of crap.
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