It can go one of a few ways.
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Apart from the few subs that remain offline, it'll basically be back to normal. Those that do remain offline indefinitely just get forcibly reopened or recreated by admins, especially huge subreddits like /r/videos. Smaller ones just get redicted to /r/topicnew or some other creative name.
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A lot of subreddits and more importantly moderators and users leave the site permanently. In order for this to happen however, there'd have to be a consensus alternative, which there isn't ATM. Otherwise, these communities are pretty much lost forever unless the mods put a message to go to X alternative service in the "subreddit is private" banner. Tbh, I don't think people are gonna stomach losing years of their lives in an instant so they'll just re create subreddits unless the mods provide an alternative.
No matter what though, they're not backing down on the effective removal of the API (still leaving the sneaky clause "you can pay us if you want but it'll be a king's ransom" for AI, even though they can just trawl the web manually lol). They'll probably announce some crappy customization features to hoodwink those who don't know what an API is and lie to them and say it's "API v2" or whatever.
I just honestly don't know how it's going to shake out and I'm scared im going to lose these communities. I don't give a single solitary fuck about Reddit the company anymore, and I never did really. I just hope all of the subreddits find a new home and don't just shrug their shoulders and say "welp, guess that's it guys".
Squabbles seems to have not hit user critical mass. Tildes looks like it's doing well.
The Lemmy + Kbin fediverse seems to be taking off like a rocket and has the best overall chance IMO of becoming the home for the best parts of Reddit's community.
I want to add, that my wife has been a "scab" throughout all this and has been active on reddit, trying to show me memes and such.
The content she's been showing me has been stale, old stuff I saw back in 2020. Same recycled jokes, same memes. Reddit is in a mode of hard cope right now and I doubt it gets better if we don't return.
My wife was on Reddit for about 9 years when she got hooked on TikTok about a year ago. In her words, Reddit had become boring. She still checks the local community sub, but that is about it. Just worth pointing out that Reddit is facing pressure from two ends. A lot of the more casual users, and the popular content creators, are on TikTok and other video centric platforms. Reddit can't compete there, as much as they try. The dedicated users they did have, those interested in community and discussion, well Reddit just angered much of that group.
Prior to the blackout, I was angry with Reddit. Since the blackout I've taken a step back and realized how much garbage Reddit is filled with (ads, shitposts, promoted content, etc), and how much I want to find something better. Before the blackout I was planning to quit Reddit out of anger. Now I plan to quit because, as my wife said, Reddit is boring and I'm excited to explore what comes next.
Seems like grounds for a divorce.
I kid of course! My girlfriend is staying off Reddit, but she’s definitely missing it and hasn’t found a good substitute for her mix of subreddits yet. It’s especially rough since twitter’s gone downhill, and that was her other main scrollable content.
My husband deleted his account in solidarity even though I think he doesn't fully understand the nuances of the issue
NTA divorce immediately
On the 3rd meme recycle people wil get bored already. It probably takes less than a month to happen, as long as the "community strike" continues.
For the first 12 hrs or so it was just a bunch of as reddit posts. Like 20 pages of it and a few political
Isn't this developed by one person, isn't open source and forbids NSFW in general? That is never going to go well.
No mobile app and no
ActivityPubso it's a very specialised. Additionally I don't like the UI at all and I've read this in multiple threads here as well.Both are show the same content as they are federated so it's up to who prefers what really. I prefer Lemmy, but anything is fine.
re Squabbles: yes, hard agree.
re Tildes: yes, also hard agree. The invitation-only method of growing the community also is draconian and it's going to hit all the scaling problems a traditional site does.
These and others are why you're finding me with you here in the fediverse. I am with you mi beratna.
I've been here for a week and it already feels like home!
I think people underestimate how much people are unlikely to go back to an abusive relationship when they've found one that isn't. Reddit was a bad habit. I am actually going to be contributing to communities here once I figure it all out. The worst that could happen here so far is not getting any comments or votes which is fine by me. On reddit I could post a picture of my cat and someone could comment "insert random derogatory term" for no reason lol! So far so good here.
Obligatory random derogatory term!
Your mother...she's older than you!
It really depends on how you interacted with Reddit. A lot of my engagement was with smaller subreddits that sometimes had user bases that weren't necessarily the most tech savvy. I'm not sure how long it took some of the older people on r/quilting to find it, but I'm sure it will take them longer to find the Lemmy version.
I feel this and I’m in the same camp
Two days and same!
Yeah. It really reminds me of reddit a decade ago. I hadn’t really realized how much it’d changed before now. Reddit slowly went from a feeling of community to me just sitting isolated and scrolling numbing content. This feels so much more alive.
Yeah, seriously looked at Reddit alternatives when I saw a post from a big sub about going dark and how they were considering moving to tildes - but then found it was invite only. Seems silly for a million+ sub to migrate somewhere invite only
Funny enough, I've seen people assume Lemmy also forbids NSFW. I think they just never found lemmynsfw.com, which is basically the access point to the porniverse (you're welcome btw if you found it here).
There was also the thing with Beehaw banning that one other instance with Loli, which might have been seen by some who hadn't even thought of NSFW content at all as "oh, porn not okay then".
The main problem with NSFW content in Lemmy is that it's almost exclusively in some media format which effectively tends to put a huge strain on the system, be it technical difficulties or storage space in general.
If the lemmy platform wants to survive, NSFW content needs to be allowed but the technical difficulties will probably take a while to be fully resolved.
That's not the only instance that allows nsfw even. The one I'm on seems to allow it if marked as such, though it's not really for that in particular, and there's a second furry instance that I've seen pop up recently with a pretty big user overlap with the one I joined that's explicitly for nsfw.
I reckon a lot of the platforms popping up with closed ecosystems will stagnate after a while. ActivityPub is brilliant and I hope more platforms adopt it!
While I’m enjoying my time here and I’m honestly shocked with the amount of engagement so far, I just don’t see the “fedaverse” ever gaining any mainstream traction. It’s unintuitive and the barrier of entry is way too high. Even googling “Lemmy” doesn’t bring up useful results.
Something like squabbles has a better chance for mainstream appeal, but it would need a miracle as it’s only one duder
That being said, I’ll still be here!
Honestly, the lack of mainstream appeal is part of why I like it.
Just remember - as content is generated SEO is naturally going to improve, which will start to bring people into kbin/lemmy via Google.
As people spend time here marketing types will start to notice. Shortly thereafter we will see bots. To me, how we as a community handle those bots will be the real "does this experiment survive" test.
Absolutely. It's only a matter of time before someone sees the value in the information/data that is here and begin indexing the entire fediverse/site and working on SEO for it.
There are countless examples of indexers for GitHub for example, if you do any searching for questions related to coding. Pretty much every issue and repo has been indexed.
When reddit first popped up, posts from it came up in search results very rarely, now it's pretty much at the top of many searches, since it's a bastion of knowledge and community groups.
It's really only a matter of time if things do go well here.
Me too. No large corporations guiding the communities and more open discussions can be had without fear of being banned.
Not sure about that. I saw a post today about lemmy.ml's admin, who's also one of the main lemmy developers, banning people who said something bad about China for "orientalism", then doubling down in it in the comments. Apparently mod logs for any instance can be accessed by any mod of any other instance. Otherwise I wouldn't have even known. Not sure how I feel about using a service developed by someone so toxic, who's also in charge of a big chunk of user accounts.
If you dont like the moderation here you can use a different instances. Thats the main reason why Lemmy has federation. And our job is to build this software, not be perfect moderators who somehow make everyone happy.
And if I want to participate in a community that's hosted on lemmy.ml I'm still under his jurisdiction. Besides, someone this banhappy being in charge of the development doesn't fill me with much confidence. Nothing stops them from implementing some hidden change that prevents sharing something they don't like.
yeah when you get used to reddit sinophobia (which is a product of their "policy" department that's aligned with the atlantic council and other quasi-government think tanks) anything else feels like oppression.
It's not helped by the fact that it has the same name as a famous musician. Googling for Lemmy just brings him up — the Fediverse doesn't show up unless you scroll down a ways, if it even shows on the front page at all. Same with Tildes and Squabbles, both being already existing words. Branding is important for recognizability, and "Reddit" has the advantage of being a unique name.
I'd rather it not have a big mainstream appeal.. feels like every time I start to get into something the normies show up and start ruining it. So far I've been enjoying what I see here and am interested to see what happens.
I fully agree with you that it's unintuitive and the barrier to entry. I consider myself pretty technical, and it took hours to figure out enough about how it works, what I need to worry about, etc. And I still have major unanswered questions about how moderating works with federation.
Contrast that to (almost) all other monolithic social media. The steps to get started are to go to their main site, click the link at the top to sign up, follow the simple prompts, then find people or communities to engage with.
This isn't going to be a great migration. More of a great fragmentation.
Which is what should happen in my opinion.
Let small communities be small, let them govern themselves.
Fragmentation / Federation is honestly the right path.
As long as they aren't too small. There's a critical mass below which they're too empty.