We are losing a lot, this new ActivityPup fediverse is exciting but it is like going back a decade for long-term reddit users.
Reddit obviously sucks now and has been like this for years, IMO it was newReddit and its focus on Facebook users that was the biggest event declining quality. What we had slowly eroded and its no longer there, but there were still enough smaller active communities that it could still be a good experience.
We are rebuilding and it is fun and exciting, but we are losing a big part of our lives in the process, we wont have something equal to what we lost for a couple years to come.
I also see this as the one's moving from Reddit have some solid principles aka won't let a greedy CEO trash his userbase so we prefer to lose a big chunk of our internet lives than to support said bastard.
I agree, as someone who saw reddit evolve from r/reddit.com to what it is today, it took about 4 years for them to really get to peak old reddit with the introduction of multireddits. Other than that most of the development has been in the third party apps, and really much of that development has been updating the apps to match the evolving OS design language rather than new reddit API endpoints. But we now have the advantage of having a minimum viable product and people with years of experience building and moderating communities.
After Elon and Rogen harassed a covid scientist today with a follower doxing and going to the scientist’s house, I’m not sure how long twitter has left. That lawsuit is going to bury shit fast.
Fucking Joe Rogen man. I keep trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. He seems like the sort of person who believes what the last person told him until someone tells him the opposite. But now it seems like he's becoming actually malicious.
He has always been disingenuous and attracts people based off his willingness to smoke pot and do other drugs. He wants to uphold some kind of intellectual street cred by trying to goat people into a debate, but debate with people like Rogen is disingenuous and set up to make them a winner and the other a loser. It is the alt-right playbook over and over
Yeah, the entire niche industry community I was on twitter for absolutely ate it during the early days of Elon and the majority have moved on - mainly to social media spaces like Insta or TikTok.
We got some of them on Reddit, even - though that sure was a brief and shallow victory, all told.
Yeah I'm software educator in a few small niches. I used to just go and search the topic and make friends, help people out but now 99% of the posts are automated shilling for some business or some SEO spam.
I still try to pop in but it seems like Twitter is a lost cause especially since they put search behind login now. Just like Reddit they have alienated content creators and it shows.
People didn't switch from Twitter to Mastodon because Twitter was still working. You could still post your content, you still had all your followers there.
Reddit, on the other hand, went "dark". Millions of users couldn't use their favorite subreddits. And through word of mouth, many of us found the fediverse alternatives Lemmy and Kbin. But sadly (and also understandably, because they put a ton of work into them), many mods didn't link to these alternatives, in the hopes that Spez would change his mind. In a way, this is the reason why Lemmy and Kbin are not growing even faster.
Reddit is unsalvageable and had been for a long time, but again, you are not going to be able to take the redditor out of people even if they move somewhere else for a long time.
None of us should be trying to build a better reddit here, we should be aiming to build something new, knowing what works and what doesn't from our time as redditors.
The farther this goes, the more I think you may be right about Reddit being unsalvagable.
I think with different ownership, things could have worked out very differently. But the current shareholders and board obviously don't care much that their property has gone from one of the most liked and trusted sites on the Internet to one of the most publicly hated in like 3 weeks. They think this will make them money otherwise they'd have reined Spez in or fired him.
More importantly, I think this sort of thing can happen with ANY non-federated platform. As long as the users aren't the ones ultimately in charge, it can and probably will eventually happen.
Some people like my bf just browse for a little bit of their communities and don‘t care about anything else.
However, if we make this place interesting enough they will come naturally, those sorts of people are like moths who are attracted to interesting content.
Reddit will survive and thrive but that's not hope, it:s the opposite. The site is massive and sucks up all.yhe oxygen in the room, plus the majority of users don't care about API changes, they just want to scroll through some memes while having a crap.
Because Reddit has been our online home for years. It's where our communities are, where are online friends are, it's become home. People have spent thousands of hours building communities there, as a labor of love.
Unfortunately I agree with you- the home is on fucking fire and unless a monsoon spontaneously erupts we should get the hell out before it burns to the ground.
Why? Because the whole reason reddit is even worth visiting is the posters.
Sure, the people in charge of the whole infrastructure that supports the act of posting and reading posts are making destructive "business decisions", but until now they've largely been basically a bunch of invisible, nameless, inconsequential people as long as the proverbial lights stayed on for my ten years on reddit. They were technically in charge of stuff, but any time there was drama around reddit employees themselves, I had to go to places like /r/outoftheloop or /r/ELI5 in order to figure out what in the actual heck the inexplicable hubub was all about.
To me, that means they're NOT what reddit is, they're just the people who make it possible.
The folks who do lights and sound at a stage play are necessary for the play to function at that particular theater, but if they were the only ones doing anything there, noone would show up and stick around.
Inertia is a horrible thing. It took a LONG time for most of the niche communities on reddit to get "established" enough to have semi-regular content. Inertia being what it is, it will likely take quite a while for the same to happen here and it won't be exactly the same thing. It may be better and worse in some ways, but it WILL be different and some of us were quite comfortable with what we had. So, yeah, hope, because losing something you like and care about, watching it get gutted, wrecked, hobbled, and ruined is not inspiring or fun.
That being said, I'm seeing very encouraging things happening here so far, so this might become my new home.
Reddit is profiting a lot from the network effect. By now this reddit is a known brand, has a lot of content is already there, has a lot of people (especially non-technical users) are already on reddit, and they're there to stay.
All the other reddit alternatives, including lemmy and/or the fediverse suffers from:
Bugs (I love lemmy, but gosh, have you seen how buggy and sometimes unresponsive it is?)
The complexity of "servers" (don't get me wrong, federation is the way to go IMHO, but it is confusing to non-technical users)
Lack of content
Lack of users
Everybody is talking about the Digg exodus, but nobody is saying that it didn't happen in a day, it took ~1 to 2 years.
Lemmy is buggy and unresponsive for you? Huh. For me it's both way more responsive and not buggy at all, kinda why I decided to give it a shot, instead of dropping social media all together...
The server thing isn't that bad, just go to lemmy.world and make an account, really not that difficult.
And the lack of content and people is because people started caring about lemmy like a week ago...
Compare to old [dot] reddit [dot] com? Yes, a thousand times yes! When clicking on "Reply" or "Post" I see spinning a spinning wheels for ~30s. Sometimes, I'm looking at the front page of a community, and new posts rush in over the websocket from different communities. It looks like the websocket updates are absurdly buggy.
If you're comparing the reddit's redesign, I guess lemmy is about as responsive/buggy.
The server thing isn’t that bad
Because you're a technical user. For the average user, it's convoluted and unnecessary. (Again, I'm a huge fediverse supporter, it has to be this way, but I have to admit it's not user friendly.)
I haven't ever used old reddit, I'm comparing lemmy to the new reddit and it's 100 times more responsive if anything. I don't have to wait like 10 seconds after I click on a post every time, it's amazin.
The complexity of “servers” (don’t get me wrong, federation is the way to go IMHO, but it is confusing to non-technical users)
I'll admit the technical stuff is probably the most off-putting. Most major social media got where it is by being idiot proof. The whole set-up will need to be much more streamlined if they want to really dip into Reddits user base.
For example, join-lemmy.org should do this, IMHO, without any technicality. Just transparently register to random server, with a curated cross-servers pre-selected list of subscriptions. Once users are distributed across servers, people will just recommend friends/family to join their own server, then the centralization of join-lemmy.org won't become an issue. But I might be utopian.
I don't think a lot of people who are in the know have any expectation of this turning around and going well, but I don't blame anyone for hoping it will. The existing communities that are uprooted from all this, not to mention the headaches of signing up for new platforms and all that entails, aren't exactly ideal. Avoiding them from being necessary would be fantastic... alas, that hope is indeed slim.
I get a "sunk-cost fallacy" feel from it. Like Bill Hicks' bit went- This HAS to be real. Look at my furrows of worry- look at all this Karma. This has to be real!"
I watched his recent interview (only for 10mins) but he described Reddit quite accurately. Namely, reddit(or platforms like ours) is a city, a city is living only if people are living. Also, he knew that very minimal and subtle moderation is the right way.
It sounds like a CEO who knows its stuff, but facts have been shown his actions and attitudes are outrageous. The moderation was good enough to reach success for 18 years, only bc people do it for Reddit for free. He only took the free ride on it.
The biggest problem I have with this guy is that the API charges is really selling people knowledges and memories as a product. It is supposed to free and open. He is taking all the profits as business with no promises or giving back to the community. This model simply doesn't work well with us, I would rather stick to decentralised model as long as it is reasonably efficient.
There is nothing inherently problematic about charging for API access, it's the fact that the price they've set is ludicrous, something like 25 cents per thousand calls when you'd expect it to be more along the lines of 4-5 dollars per million calls.
It's like someone buying a free parking garage, letting mopeds park for free, and charging cars five hundred dollars a day for parking, and then, instead of just being honest and saying "Fuck people with cars no cars allowed," saying that the car drivers are at fault for wanting to use a more full-featured vehicle that takes more space
Indeed, if the prices were reasonable this would not be a problem. I believe that the Apollo developer even said as much (or maybe it was rif's developer - or neither and I'm just imagining it) - and I have no objection to it either, the servers aren't free to run after all. But the rate the used? It's just absolutely fucking incomprehensible.
The shitty treatment of third party developers is just the unmentionable icing on this already disgusting cake.
Even more so, the Apollo developer said he could probably have figured out a way to make it work at that price if he was given more time.
The issue was that he already has a bunch of yearly subscriptions at a specific rate so he'd have to eat a loss of many millions of dollars until subscriptions at a new higher rate were a sufficient proportion of his user base.
I have no idea. He did everything that I predicted he would do.
I think the problem might be is that people don't like moving to other platforms, especially if the platform isn't mainstream. Reddit hasn't been good in years. Honestly at this point I hope it fails miserably and people are forced to go to another platform. However the age old problem of power hungry CEOs etc will probably happen yet again. People need to move to the fediverse, but most people are too stubborn.
The vast majority of reddits userbase are consumers. They are already using the official app and don't care about the politics of the platform. These people are only there to get their content fix.
I realised this when I saw a post on a subreddit where someone shared on how to turn off some kind of notification in the official app. So many other people thanked this person... Reddit has become another mainstream social media site like FB, Instagram and so on.
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