So what corners have redditors gathered to during the blackout?
Here (kbin), Lemmy, Tildes... I hear Mastodon had a user spike. Is there something obvious I'm missing?
I ask because I haven't felt the same mass of users that Reddit had. Obviously users have spread out, servers have been hammered, UIs have a learning curve and so on... But there might be other alternatives I haven't looked at that are worth that look.
After reddit my needs from a social book marking website are simple:
Completely open source
Moderators can be recalled by the communities they mod.
Not for profit (ads are not the primary source of funding)
The internet needs to have something like reddit as core infrastructure. A digital public square. This requirement is incompatible with profit motive. This is why time and time again social media sites fail.
A st Peter's square of everyone trying to be the funniest person in the room. It was impossible trying to have any level of conversation because everyone just jumped in with a dumb joke constantly
Not unreasonable pricing. The estimate I saw for reddit is about 30 cents a year per user is their current take. Would I have paid $5 a year for ad free access? You bet your ass I would, but it wouldn't be nearly greedy enough for Reddit.
Once I get my bearings and decide where I'm going to be hosted (bouncing between beehaw, here and Lemmy) I'll be contributing regularly. I'm happy to pay when I know It's going for something like this, not to make a creeper into a billionaire.
#1 I can get on board with, but #2 and #3 seem a bit, for lack of a better word, "naive".
Who wants to be an unpaid volunteer to work potentially hours a day and be beholden to the whims of a community, the exact same people they have to worry about moderating? If you censor or ban someone, now you have to worry about them instigating a revolt to get you demodded as well? How many people are willing to both actual do hard work as a moderator, and also deal with that sort of nonsense?
So, you can't do ads, but good luck asking people to pay up. If there is anything Redditors (and ex-Redditors) hate more than anything, it's asking them to pay money for anything. If you can figure out this problem then you'll have solved a problem that has plagued online communities for decades.
Before reddit and even now there were community forums. Those were moderated in the same way without paying people. I think if people care about something, they donate their time for free. There has to be some way to make it worthwhile. In the case where no one wants to moderate because they're being held accountable, which is just ridiculous.
As for ads and supporting a system, some community members care about the thing they support. So they'll donate money (like myself). Before reddit started going crazy with their IPO crap, they used to have a progress bar on the front page that showed how much money needed to be donated in order to support the infrastructure at that time. Any community website should have that. For people who care about that website, they can donate and they can see the progress of their donation making a difference.
I donate to everything I use because I care about it. But as you said, a lot of people don't. So there needs to be some way to fund these things that doesn't involve taking money from advertisers because it's 100% proven advertisers will pull their advertising if they don't agree with something on the website. And this affects everybody. You can't rely on ads. One of the reasons Reddit is increasing their API pricing because of AI companies taking their data and using it to train their models. If we had some website that the community controlled, we can do the same but at a much cheaper price. This can support the website.
But then again, it all comes down to the people who control the website, the community donating their information for free, and people being okay with not getting rich off of it, or amassing power, which is the problem. Everyone wants to get rich, but this space is difficult to do that and keep everything free as in freedom.
If reddit simply wanted to sustain its userbase, it'd be in a much better place.
That's fundamentally the problem with the internet (and corporate culture as a whole, really). When a site takes off, the expectation isn't to sustain the status quo, it's to continue that growth. It inevitably reaches a point where maintaining exponential growth becomes more and more difficult, but even more profit still needs to be made. They find ways to squeeze every last goddamn drop out of it, almost always to the detriment of the users, the user's experience, and everyone's privacy.
The never-ending growth model is fundamentally the problem here, and that's why I completely agree with you. Like you said, "This requirement is incompatible with profit motive."
Ironically, reddit was open source. Here's the python source code repo for what the site was between 2005-2017. They have it preserved in an archive, and reddit the company still does contribute a lot of open source code and to open source projects, but I don't think the react rewrite of the site is included in that list.
What you said about Mastodon would surely differ from instance to instance, unless you’re referring to the global feed where everything is federated.
What I personally like most about Mastodon, Lemmy and Kbin is that they don’t use an algorithm to decide on my behalf what I should or shouldn’t see. If I subscribe to another user, I will see their posts, and I will see them in the correct chronological order. Not this hidden secret “personalization” algorithm that randomly decides to hide something from me because it wouldn’t draw engagement, and decides to show me something I didn’t ask for because it would.
Yessss, I didn't even think about that once I started using kbin/mastodon, but you are totally right. There's a reason why the for-profit social media things absolutely don't want to just give you a chronological feed.
Nice thing about Lemmy instances is you can pick and choose the communities across any random server and sub to them from kbin, without directly interacting with that server. Once an app comes along that lets you browse and discover across lemmy/kbin/tildes the same way you could just search subreddits I think it could take off.
Yeah right now there's https://browse.feddit.de/ to browse communities, but putting that in an app (and adding some sorting/filtering options) would be a killer feature
edit: that site only shows Lemmy communities, not kbin ones
What makes Tildes.net different? Does it do anything differently than Reddit, or is it mostly just a clone?
I haven't browsed it for more than a few minutes nor do I have an invite so it would be nice to hear if there's anything that makes it stand out from other alternatives.
That got shut down pretty rapidly once the reddit blackout happened. I emailed asking for one. I read somewhere that they have a queue of something like 2,000 invite requests to work through, so it might be a while.
No, it's centralized, basically a dude trying to re-create reddit with some twitter-like functions and a tweaked UI. So far he's been diligent, responsive, and willing to (eventually) ban racist trolls, but he has his eye on maintaining control and moving towards monetization. IMHO he's also in a bit over his head, for instance spending a large amount of time working on local image uploads to spur engagement on meme subs before listening to his user base, who were reminding him of the bandwidth, costs, and legal oversight he'd incur.
The simplicity of it has attracted people though, and engagement seems good. It's not a bad site; it just has more potential failure points than something open-source, decentralized, and not-for-profit.
Lemmy had some problematic stuff around the person who runs it
What problematic stuff, exactly? I remember reading about some tankie stuff, but with the amount of information I had to digest the last couple of days, I'm not sure if that was about Lemmy or some other site.
I'm using kbin.social mostly, I will just follow Lemmy communities from kbin once federation is re-enabled. It doesn't make sense to me to have an account for Lemmy AND an account for kbin if they're both part of the Fediverse.
I am also using Mastodon, even though it's part of the Fediverse. I'm doing this because it's more like Twitter, and the tweet equivalent on Mastodon is the same as a "Microblog" on kbin.
Ditto on the last point. I understand other Fediverse platforms like Mastodon and such should just work with others like Kbin/Lemmy, but the UI's are so massively different. So I've went with the idea of having separate accounts. One for my existing Mastodon instance and one here on Kbin. To me it feels like the best way to manage it.
As a bonus to all of this, I should be able to easily follow my Kbin account and boost posts over on Mastodon if needed once federation is all sorted.
I like that everything has a different UI but should all connect eventually. I never really got into it like Twitter, but I was on Reddit for a decade. I chose kbin because the UI is similar to Reddit, but now I’ll be able to venture to those other sites for content while using a UI I understand better.
Still I may create accounts on other networks just to snag a name in case I decide to leave kbin.
One additional plus to using kbin over Lemmy is there's no "Microblog" feature on Lemmy. So if you follow Mastodon accounts on Lemmy, you won't see anything. Whereas if you follow Mastodon accounts on kbin, their posts will come in as Microblogs!
To my knowledge, you will have to do it manually. You would simply search for user@mastodon.instance.
So for example, I followed my own Mastodon account by searching for Lilkev@mastodon.social (see image below).
There might be a script or something floating around that can automate the process, but not any that I am aware of at least.
NOTE: The people's posts you are following on Mastodon will not show up on kbin right now due to Federation currently being disabled/not working. But, they should populate with data once Federation on kbin is fixed.
Kbin and Mastodon right now, and now that federation is working on kbin again the amount of activity has gotten so much better. I want to try Tildes too, but haven't managed to get an invite yet. I haven't been back to reddit since the blackout began, and really the only thing that has a chance of drawing me back there is the niche small subreddits that don't really exist anywhere else without a critical mass of users. At the moment, though, I haven't felt any urge to go back, and it has been a nice break. Really made me realize how much I was hitting up reddit out of habit.
subreddits that have jumped ship from reddit entirely that I am aware of:
r/traaas - to raddle
r/popheads (maybe) - to discord
r/mashup - to discord
r/disneyland - to discord and kbin
r/gameboy - to discord
While the official communities (as in backed by the original mods) all seemingly went to discord, a lot of users I notice have been going to a little bit of everything.
List of software I am aware of: tildes, kbin, lemmy, raddle, squabbles, discord, hacker news (for the techies)
The best i've seen yet are tildes and kbin. I like both.
Tildes being invite-only and with a specific philosophy, will never challenge reddit, but it is really interesting on its own right.
Kbin is also very nice IMO.
I believe for now many redditors are waiting to see what happens before jumping ship. The next few months will be interesting to say the least.
I agree! I’ve been enjoying it, despite the fact that it’s still growing so there’s not a heap of content. I’m spreading my time across squabbles, kbin and mastodon and so far like them all for different reasons.
Both set up on Hermit Apps too, which is working well for the most part—surprisingly well. I'm tempted to even try loading old.reddit on it, but it's the principle of the matter that stops me.
Hm, it shouldn’t need to be a separate extension (especially not one exclusive to Chrome only). It should be a TamperMonkey script so everyone can use it.
I just need certain tech groups, automotive groups and fuzzy kitties so I think kbin will probably be fine. I use RIF for reddit and it's just plain stupid to kill 3rd party apps and screw with the API after all this time.
We really need a functional app for lemmy/kbin/tildes stat. There's lots of UI polish needed to get to the point where people can find and check their communities as easily as they're used to.
Also, as a mod, my biggest reticence around trying to bring my communities here is the lack of any equivalent for wikis. I think in a few weeks we could be in a place where it's a real replacement but by then the blackout may be forgotten and it might be too late.
We've got this wave (blackout); the next will be when RiF and Apollo die and then, in uncertain order, the IPO and killing off of old.reddit and RES with it.
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