The #RedditMigration isn’t about any app being better than Reddit. It’s about a company that’s grown on the backs of volunteer labour now claiming ownership of that labour.
Reddit didn’t write those posts, draw those illustrations, make those videos. We did.
And Reddit sure as hell didn’t create those communities, nurture them, and moderate them. We did.
I agree with tech writers who say that the average person just “wants their memes”. But Reddit never made those memes. We did.
Content might be king. But who makes content? We do.
I have no doubt that the average person just wants content. But while we might be providing content for free, we’re not dancing monkeys. Who decides why content is made, how it’s made, and where it exists? We do.
The Fediverse doesn’t exist merely as an engine for content. It exists so that people can share what they love.
Why are people coming to the Fediverse specifically? Because we rightfully see ActivityPub as insurance for our content – which, again, is made by and for us.
Not Reddit. Not Big Social. Us.
If I’m giving my content away for free, then so long as it is federated, no one company can own it – putting up gates, demanding payment for my work. Instead, my work is out there, living on 24,000 nodes that presently exist.
Android Authority might dismiss this as “suffering the same fate” – what fate they perceive, I don’t know. But to me, the true “suffering” is when a company like Reddit claims ownership of my work, locking 3rd party developers out from API access.
For this reason, I’m locking Reddit out from my work.
Perhaps the author of this post, Dhruv Bhutani, doesn’t consider that he’s writing for a, well, blog. And that this blog exists on its own domain, with its own design, as its own property. He could have written this entire post on Reddit, but he didn’t.
Why? I suspect it’s because he believes his work has value, and Reddit simply doesn’t give him what he believes is his worth.
Same deal with me. I’m not looking to get paid for my work on Reddit. I do it for fun – always have. But if I’m doing something for fun, it’s still going to be on my terms.
Not all of us creatives are willing to be a cog in Big Social’s machine. That’s why I’m here on the Fediverse right now. I don’t give a damn whether the average person just wants memes. I create for me.
So yeah, Lemmy and Kbin suck. I can live with that – they will both improve. And I have no doubt that, with time, they might prove to be better than Reddit.
But this isn’t about how good Lemmy or Kbin are. Nor is this about the insatiable appetite for memes.
This is about my need to create on my terms – and I’m not alone here.
@TerryHancock@atomicpoet@fediversenews I'm kind of new-ish to the Fediverse thing, and maybe I'm off here, but one thing that really annoys me is seeing people say that brand new things that are still in their relative infancy suck compared to whatever the Big Social alternative is.
People forget what a lot of these big apps were like in their infancy as well. It's just not a fair comparison and people are deeply impatient.
@atomicpoet@fediversenews Interesting that he cites “Mastodon and Bluesky” as examples of failures. I don’t know about the latter, but every time I come back to Mastodon, it seems more vibrant and active. Seems to me it’s doing pretty well for a failure.
@tanepiper I just went back to check comments I deleted 7 fucking years ago and sure enough they're back. just wtf. I had done a purge and deleted an alt account of mine since it had personal details relating trans stuff back when I first came out. reddit just went ahead and undeleted all of that wtfff.
@c_9@djsaunders03@alysondecker@absamma@BlackAzizAnansi Two of the crummiest things about fascists are 1) the extraordinary amount of money they have access to 'cos so many billionaires are straight-up fascists, and 2) how effectively they coordinate and carry out long-term strategies of mass oppression and immiseration.
while i'm sad to see #reddit circling the toilet, it only reminded me of how urgent it is that we finally ditch centralized social media. reddit itself isn't the problem - it's a symptom of a much more generalized problem we've had since FB became a thing in the late 00's.
i've spent the past week re-purposing, patching, porting, and expanding a great piece of software based on the same #nntp protocol that #usenet uses, for creating discussion groups. i'm calling it "tomo" (友 - 'friend') bbs.
some time soon folks can spin up their own tomo shards, create discussion groups in a similar manner to reddit, decide whether they want to keep the group restricted to their shard, or share the group with other tomo shards in a public network of discussion groups called tomonet. completely decentralized private or public discussions without supercorporation bs.
best of all, since it is based on plain 'ol usenet-like nntp, you can read and post to discussion groups from a 1977 VAX mainframe, a 1984 IBM PCjr at 2400 baud, an Apple Newton, or a brand new phone.
i can't wait to bust out forté free agent for windows 3.11 and get posting this weekend. 😎
Watching #Elon and now #Reddit CEO Huffman run the same play, it makes me think that Matt Muellenweg may be the only tech CEO left that I can think of has any credibility on the #OpenWeb. #WordPress#Automattic
@tchambers The Ghost CEO is also amazing. Substack stole their whole (open source) code without accreditation and he basically said “look, I know you were going to steal from someone anyway, but if you take it from us who are already giving it for free, at least say thank you as we ask you for.”
@stux super happy to see smaller instances pop up for Lemmy. And Kbin. Just recently started to see kbin posts on my Lemmy feed and it was super cool to see.
With the Apollo app for Reddit shutting down soon, I’m going to need to start relying on Mastodon for all of my cute animal photo, gif, and story needs. #Apollo#Reddit#Animals#SmallTalk
(1/20) IMPORTANT UPDATE [1]
Reasons for #Lemmy's removal:
I have removed my indirect endorsement of #Lemmy as a substitute for #Reddit.
The developers have a very dubious stance towards human rights and do not object to people celebrating #Stalin's birthday, a man who directly and indirectly killed 6-9 million people.
Besides, they apparently are die-hard communists, supporting the #Kremlin (#tankies):
Adblockers and alternative frontend will only get you so far in this. It's literally just a matter of time until step it to yet another level. Want some real change? Stop giving them power. #Boycott these fuckers.
"Youtube has started to artificially slow down video load times if you use Firefox" -> https://archive.is/yAdak (link to avoid direct #reddit)
Bring down closed data silos like #YouTube. Empower #foss federated platforms like #peertube.
Agreed, however content takes time and money to produce, how can we ensure a similar income stream on platforms such as Peertube, given it's decentralized nature.
In light of the ongoing changes at #Reddit and their CEO praising how Musk has handled #Twitter, IF you are a current regular user of Reddit, do you plan to:
@lauren "keep using...". I stopped using it 3 years ago, after some 14 years of on-off extensive use. Didn't like the direction then.
Current situation is a continuation of the direction taken four years ago.
@jcrabapple@birnim@Drew@Gina I can vouch for infosec.pub. Runs exceptionally well and, as it’s part of the Jerryverse, will continue to be. Everything @jerry runs is just… chefs kiss
Every time you hear the Reddit CEO talking about how they need to become profitable, remember they raised $250m and then spent the last couple years building this: https://nft.reddit.com
Proposing that Lemmy or Kbin could substitute for Reddit while not acknowledging that lack of search makes it impossible to find the appropriate groups in a decentralized maze of servers is very on-brand for the Mastodon crowd. #search#reddit#federated @fediverse
> We (the internet community) made such a terrible mistake with #SocialMedia. We formed connections and communities and friendships [but] those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain social connections as long as they continue to produce monetary value for an intermediary. An awful, awful mistake.
@smallcircles THANK You - great words! Also on this thread: "We spent so many years crowdsourcing these curated knowledge bases on a variety of subjects for free to the point that it's empowered the controlling companies to firewall them now and then make our input a commodity that they can turn around and sell to us....They take our words and ideas and give nothing back in return."
Agreed. Larger community spaces: discord servers, subreddits--are owned by corporations. It is terribly hard to get around that, especially given that google search results are never going to send you to a forum in this day and age.
But personal connections: for the people I like and make friends with, I almost always send them the necessary details to communicate with me via email--or even letters.
Dear #Reddit mods who have STILL locked their subs - now you’re just being dickheads and pissing the rest of us off. Do I really need to start my own /r/AppHookup2? This tantrum is achieving NOTHING, nor was there a way it ever could have. The site isn’t yours. Move out.
@dhrystone@benreaves I think the point you are missing is that the footstompers and arm-folders are wielding a social media moderator’s scepter. You just don't like it.
In any event, r/AppHookup2 is up now - presumably, you had no hand in creating it. Hope you enjoy it!
PS: Unlike your dream of how social media ought to work, Reddit still allows you to create as many subreddits as you want... so you can have as much fun on the toilet as you would like.
For people invested in the migration from #reddit. Here's some details about #BrutaLinks one of the projects I'm working on, which is a reddit-like discussion platform, built on top of #ActivityPub.
It didn't benefit from the attention and funding that lemmy got, so probably it's overall less polished and performant, but some love from the community would do it good.
The #Reddit protests have been a disaster, blackout with an end date, some subs deciding to continue it but many just giving up, now subs that don't give up are being forced open by admins/replacing mod team, subs that open of own accord becoming shitpost subs as a "protest". Within a week or 2 people will get bored of the shitposting and go back to using the sub like normal and absolute nothing will have changed. Like Mastodon with Twitter, Lemmy has seen massive growth but Reddit has not seen a mass exodus of users.
@lambalicious@Linux@Nuuskis No I mean, I'm paying attention to what's going on and can't keep track of the alternative platforms. I would even begin to expect someone who's only ever used reddit to be doing so
This is going to burst some bubbles, but traffic levels on #Reddit (AFAIK) appear to be close to normal, including mobile traffic. Data is from r/cybersecurity and may not be representative, would love to see other mods post data.
Those that left will be paving the way for a content-filled threadiverse - we'll see if the next wave of enshittification is as-tolerated if there are more lively alternatives.
I apologize for not including alt text -- the image is a bar graph of pageviews per day. While public before the blackout, r/cybersecurity averaged ~75k pageviews/day. On the first day of reopening (after 2.5 weeks of protest, which limited content/visibility), r/cybersecurity saw 75k pageviews/day again immediately.
Nie wiem, kiedy załoga @ftdl będzie miała wolny weekend.
Jak nie zarząd #reddit i intensywne prace nad kbin.social, to #elon i ogarnianie zwiększonego ruchu #ExiTT.
W końcu awaria macierzy raid 5 i kolejne nieprzespane noce :/
Przytul czasem swojego admina @piotrsikora, zasłużył :)
Przytulam wszystkich adminów bardzo!
I ja wiem, że ja Wam tu wrzucam zdjęcia kotów i pierdoły, ale naprawdę jestem głęboko przekonana, że to co robicie, to jest fundamentalna aktywność na rzecz demokracji. I nawet jeśli się z tej demokracji korzysta po to, żeby wrzucać śmieszne kotki, to to jest jedna z najważniejszych wartości, których trzeba dzisiaj pilnować.
I'm one of those that finds value still in #reddit, especially the heavily moderated expert subreddits like the magnificent AskHistorians - unquestionably one of the greatest online communities of any era or platform. I also moderate a handful of subs and used to do more. The API changes effectively break reddit for moderation of non shitposting subs. It's not just 3rd party apps (which are crucial) but the automod bots many teams rely on. I support and have joined today's shutdown action.
#Reddit users are mad about the #API charges that hit third party #apps, but I actually find this from #Huffman much more concerning: "...data licensing is a new potential business for us."
What he's actually saying - they want to sell user data to AI companies for them to train their models. This should be a reason to delete all your content and leave the platform. In Europe, you should raise a #GDPR-deletion request.
Q:...changes are also a way for Reddit to monetize off the AI companies that are using Reddit data to train their models. Is that still a primary consideration here too, or is this more about making the money back that you’re spending on supporting these third party apps?
A: What they have in common is we’re not going to subsidize other people’s businesses for free. But financially, they’re not related. The API usage is about covering costs and data licensing is a new potential business for us.
So with half of #Reddit disolving and the #OpenSource counterpart is both 1. Not populated enough to be a worthy replacement and 2. founded and run by a Nazi fuckhead... Where will everyone go?
@WhyNotZoidberg there's no one replacement so everyone's gonna scatter I guess. hopefully will be a good thing to breathe new life into little forums thatve needed it
@WhyNotZoidberg@jannem something like 90% of active Lemmy users joined this week (graph: https://the-federation.info/platform/73 ). Personally, I'm hopeful that new majority are going to set the tone going forward & that there's enough critical mass there to make it a viable community.
p.s. Kbin is part of the Fediverse. You can follow Kbin accounts and magazines from Mastodon etc, and follow Mastodon etc accounts from Kbin.
However, the cross-platform federation doesn't seem to be working properly yet (bear in mind the project is only a few months old!).
There's also a complication about the Kbin.social server being overwhelmed over the last few days. Kbin.social has had to use Cloudflare to cope with the overwhelming load, which is known to mess up federation.
@feditips What is peoples' oppinion about Lemmy? Both seem to be viable alternatives right now, not sure about cross plattform federation between the two though.
Just as we all knew all along, #Reddit’s move to charge exorbitant fees for API access was so they can cut lucrative deals to sell user-created material to train #AI models.
I was a redditor of about 15 years when I decided to delete everything I wrote and close my account because I foresaw this hostile repurposing of what is essentially a massive store of freely-accessible, context-rich community-generated content, made by people who didn’t necessarily want their content to be used for training without compensation.
AI training is largely built on top of exploitation of labor for private gain. It’s legal in many cases, but it’s often unethical and immoral.
“Reddit Signs AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO”
@drahardja I also deleted everything I wrote there, but now I regret it. I should have replaced all of it with the dumbest LLM-generated shit I could have a local model spit out.
Or, mirroring one of the greats of computer science academic publishing, simply replaced it all with "Get me off your fucking AI training set. Get me off your fucking AI training set. ...".
raddle.me/f/touhou, the only very active link aggregator alternative to r/touhou
Hey you. Yes you, Touhou fan. Tired of r/touhou's too restrictive rules? Want a very active general 2hu forum that's hosted on a #reddit alternative with an explicit strong anti-bigotry stance? Then why not hang out and chill at #Raddle's f/touhou? We've recently reached 100 subscribers and 520 submissions! :D
activity: you just picked 3 communities which are more active on raddle. i can easily pick much more which are more active on lemmy.
i can definitely call advantages from second reply “real” but imo they are not so groundbreaking that many users would prefer raddle over lemmy.
