Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
I didn't go and check things out. But I gotta say, before I was an only Reddit user. Now I don't expect to totally forgo Reddit forever, but I now know there are alternatives and it is a nicer community so far here.
At least here I'm not getting spammed with bots and "Satan Gets Us" ads.
Same. I won't let go of Reddit completely until more of the people in my favorite subs migrate and rebuild their communities here, if they do so at all. But Lemmy and Mastodon will become my new main social hubs either way.
Someone's gotta be the early adopters, it looks like that's us today.
I'm watching the Active last month from the Lemmy stats and see that the spike didn't yet turn into a needle.
there's room on the internet for more than one link aggregator - even if reddit returns and is bigger and badder than ever, I still wont use it. that platform is dead to me now
But on the other hand, look at how much the lemmy and kbin user base has grown. The blackouts had a significant impact in increasing lemmy adoption and usage.
Prior to the announced blackouts, I had no idea Lemmy even existed. Now here I am running my own instance.
Also, advertisers Reddit sells to have halted their campaigns until “next week.”
I think while on the surface it might feel underwhelming, it had more impact than you think. And now mods are discussing extending the blackout too.
What comes after the blackout is the exodus. So in time, Reddit will decline and people would hear more about Lemmy as the network effect grows, Lemmy can come out pretty strong.
Have you ever added the word Reddit to a web search so you could find an answer online without a lot of digging?
Stuff like that I imagine got hit hard. There will always be core communities that either stay up or are easy replicate but I imagine they'll be losing a lot of smaller communities.
This is just about the only thing I use Reddit for anymore.
I'm not sure what you were expecting to see? /r/all was never going to look obviously different, there's just too many people on Reddit. 99.99% of Redditors could leave and the remaining 0.01% would still be enough to churn out a passable couple of pages of content on /r/all.
Plus the people who care about the situation are exactly the people who aren't currently participating on Reddit, so it's hardly surprising that no-one is really taking about it there.
I think the reaction on the site itself also suffered from the AMA getting hard buried.
Which was stupid. People should have upvoted the post in the AMA sub which was just a link to the AMA on the Reddit sub. It wasn't even pinned. And even if you did find it, until they did a summary you couldn't see his responses because also buried (understandably)
That said, yes, I agree with you and the adjacent poster - the upside is alternative platforms got a huge boost, and even if a lot of the influx doesn't stay, it's still a huge boost.
For me it's been pretty great. Lemmy and the fediverse kinda remind me of reddit circa 2007 or 2008 before the eternal September. I'm going to enjoy this for as long as it lasts.
I'm definitely happy the blackout encouraged me to move to the fediverse.
Same, I could never really get into mastodon as I never liked Twitter much, so I'm pretty happy I found out about Lemmy. I know everyone on this site has been saying this, but it feels fresh, and the fact that it's all open source and community owned is great.
To be honest, I'm happy with how it went. I am excited to be off of Reddit and part of the Fediverse now. I never expected Reddit to fail, but I think there will be a drastic decrease in quality content.
What I'm most happy about is that the Fediverse so far seems to be mostly actually pretty good people (though I've been largely chilling in kbin since the blackout started -- it only just turned on federation). Most past attempts to abandon reddit only saw the most toxic, horrible people leave. Sites like Voat were never an option because the users were awful. It's nice that so far, I haven't really seen any of that. In fact, it feels the opposite, with the people who left reddit being disproportionately great people, with the toxic people being more likely to stay on reddit.
I wonder if it'll last? I hope so. I wanted to leave reddit in the past but never felt like there was anywhere comparable to go that wasn't shit.
There's a decent chance it will. The fediverse is—generally speaking—a fairly friendly and welcoming place. That's in part to it's decentralized nature and individual moderation tools. Bad actors can be blocked on an individual level (I just blocked /u/donaldtrump last night because I do not want to see stupid parody accounts and just like that he's gone) as well as on an instance level for anyone not following the rules.
Each instance has their own rules about how to behave, so the bigots and whatnot get booted if they cause problems. Eventually they find an equally terrible server that will have them and once they start up again, that instance can be defederated, which is basically like cutting off the bridge to their island… no way to communicate. Eventually they end up alone or with equally terrible people on other instances.
That's not to say that the fediverse doesn't have it's share of problems or is perfect, but we're working hard to try and keep this a decent place to be.
I never expected the site to just shut down and be in flames from a 2 day partial shut down. I'm pretty happy with the communities that have popped up and discussion about alternative sites.
There's been a heap of discussion on alternatives and without the blackout I wouldn't of even found great sites like kbin.
I expect that come the 1st July when third party apps stop working, we'll get another wave of annoyance and hopefully can use that to help people flee
I know that come the 1st if nothing has changed I'll be purging all my old comments and deleting my accounts.
The question is basically, how many mods and power users moved to other platforms. It was clear that Reddit would not die over night or that the Fediverse would be able to take on all the users of Reddit.
But without much of the volunteer labour, Reddit will enter a slow death spiral of worse and worse subreddits and the remaining users will slowly leave as a result.
It was pretty underwhelming. I think ultimately it's, unfortunately, pointless. Spez gonna spez and him and other people monetarily invested in reddit will get theirs--they'll cash in on the IPO and walk after that being richer than before. Whether they stick around to try to improve the platform or not is anyone's guess but... at least there are lots of us who likely won't go back to reddit like we used to. I like this place a lot so far!
Yeah, I don't think people realize that cashing out in the IPO is likely the end goal in itself.
But I like it here, it's exciting!
There are several points to be made:
The Old Reddit, whatever it means, is long gone forever. Aaron is gone. Spez does not care. No apologies or retracting will be made and that's it.
Reddit must have calculated that there are enough 'casual' crowd (not a long timer, does not use or care about 3rd party apps or the old interface, comes for the quick laughs and watches ads) so they could withstand whatever pressure the 'hard-core' crowd (long timer, uses and cares about old UI and API changes, does not generate ad views in general, spends long hours in site) generates.
Reddit must have also considered the possibility of the second crowd simply going away. I suspect Spez or the investors simply does not give a damn about it. Ad revenues are everything and there's a loud minority that threatens to leave? Why should they care, after all? All they see is a potential for "more" growth.
What they do and must care is the eventual entrance of a sizeable competition that eats into their revenues - less visitors mean less ad revenues. Lemmy and Fediverse, as much as I love it and will keep using it, is not that threat - yet.
What will probably happen is that the wider internet will label the riot (as of now) a massive failure, laugh at the "bravery" of slacktivism or whatever the latest meme can be slapped at.
Despite that, it should mark the emerging of a sustainable group of Reddit-like communities that could, in one day, become the competition Digg never thought they would face.
No, I don't think Lemmy is perfect. I do have an issue with the dev's political stance. But as long as they don't become the Spez of what was supposed to be the Federation, and the software and the protocol and the community can sustain and rule themselves, things might be alright.
Reddit will eventually die, like many other internet websites. Perhaps not now. They won't go out in a spectacular way the Digg v4 happened, but simply wither away like Facebook. But we have another home, and it's all that matters.
Actually been dramatic for Lemmy. Users went from a little under 50K to a little over 125K total users. I do not know how that is not dramatic. It is not about Reddit really, it is about how many of these users will stay here.
The blackout is just what reddit will look like after the 30th onwards
If we really want to deal a blow to Reddit, we have to do what happened to Facebook. Get your parents to join Reddit!
That's the online equivalent of trebucheting plague-infected corpses over the wall.
Oh god.
lol, facebook is joining fediverse
You have to remember that the internet in general has short term memory but surprising good memory at other things. It was good to see people actually get together for a few days and see that there are still subreddits that stayed dark. I know people are still leaving after these apps start to close down as well.
It's hard to fight EVERY corporation, but I feel like the amount of people that have been burned by Twitter will have that lingering thought in people's mind with Reddit as well.
Only time will tell, but I hope that people continue to fight these greedy CEOs that think that they can literally get away with literally anything...
It went about as expected, IMO. 90% of redditors just don't care that much - even if they agreed with the blackout in principle, most of them were likely just waiting patiently for their favourite subs to reopen so they could go back to browsing as usual. A quick browse through some of my subscribed (and still open) subs revealed a lot of commenters weren't even clear about what was going on.
But it has had the effect of essentially kickstarting a community here which seems to be taking shape nicely and there's finally a (small but growing fast) alternative to reddit - which didn't really exist before. I can see the following months and years seeing a gradual shift in user base from reddit to here.
Reddit's not going to die overnight; that was never going to happen. But it's possible it's the beginning of the end of their empire and the slow decline to the ranks of the remember-that-website-whatever-happened-to-that club. Time will tell I guess.
Reddit doesn't have to die. This place just has to be comfy enough for us to stick around. Not everything is growth over everything.
Also, when mods of subs announce that their “protest” has an end date, it’s not a statement, just a minor inconvenience
I agree, but those who are left are either looking for easily digestible memes or content created by others. Without an engaged community, Reddit has to be afraid of the next shiny thing that comes along, and I think that TikTok has shown us that they don't even care if that next shiny thing is spying on them.
think that TikTok has shown us that they don't even care if that next shiny thing is spying on them.
I think "is spying on them" has been baked in since Snowden at least. The TikTok early adopters grew up in a post 9/11 world predicated on being spied on.
The only real difference is it was someone else's government doing the spying for a change.
The black out is still happening right now.
There are subs who are blacking out indefinitely still.
But I don't know what people expected to happen after 48 hours?
The subreddits who participated already told that it was a "warning shot" and new actions were to be taken accordingly after.
And r/all is not Reddit.
r/all is the tumor of Reddit itself. It is the instagram and facebook equivalant of the "feed page". It doesn't define what makes Reddit...Reddit.
Again something that RIF did for me, it made r/all bearable to scroll through.
It are the communities underneath who provide advice, information and a sense of comradery who define Reddit.
When those communities leave, then you can fasten your seatbelts.
Reddit and it's userbase are not gonna survive of what is happening on r/all.
It will be a marathon and we should probably see in a year or maybe 2 if what is happening was effective.
I disagree a little. I get your point that /all is not the best of Reddit, it's everything at once. But that's sort of what is missing at the moment in other places, a mass aggregate of things to pick from. Also missing is a default collection of the "best" of /all, the home or popular lists, because when you start out at one of the fediverse places you have to build your own from scratch/almost scratch. Perhaps that's better in the long run, but it is a bit overwhelming and I've seen posts already asking where to find lists of communities to join.
A private subreddit isn’t going to bubble up to the top. It’s bound to happen.
I think a better option is to let subreddits stay open and simply push their migration agenda to the top of the algorithm naturally. It might be telling their community to move to discord, fediverse, or something else.
I had a lot of hope in the lead-up to the initial 2 day blackout, but after seeing literally zero coverage about this across other media platforms I now know there will be no backpedaling on the API changes. The best we can hope for is affecting their income from ads a tiny bit.
It was getting coverage from CBC of all places... I would say the word got out onto mainstream media. However for most people on Reddit things might just keep on chugging on.
Incoming demise of third-party apps and (potential) IPO blackout should increase more interest towards fediverse link aggregator and discussion platforms...
Fediverse is neat and waiting to be discovered.
I think that it depends a great deal on what subreddits you use. I mean, I normally use only a small number, and they are all presently private or restricted, so it has an impact.
And if you specifically want information on something coming from Google and are trying to read old posts with information about, say, how to work around some bug, then that is disruptive.
But if you just hit Reddit looking for something interesting to look at or read, which is a legit use and how many people are going to use the thing, then I think that the impact is probably limited.