hey everyone. if you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout today, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy! Thanks!
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I just posted this in response to a frenetic YouTube video that claimed that the Reddit protest “failed”:
Get serious. It was NEVER going to stop the IPO. But it has accomplished something even more important: it has decapitated Reddit. A lot of the most passionate and involved users are gone, and more of them have at least tried Fediverse alternatives like Lemmy and kbin. Have you checked those sites out? They’re FLOODED with Reddit refugees, and the communities there are booming! They’re active and vibrant, with great discussions and content.
What’s more, they have hope. The members there aren’t subject to some psychotic money-grubbing corporation; if any one server goes authoritarian, there’s nothing stopping the users there from just moving to another. They’ll have the same access and functionality. And frankly, the odds of a Fediverse server going corporate and having an IPO are infinitesimal. It simply wouldn’t be worth it, particularly since there’s no way they could stop other instances from defederating with them.
So the outcome of the blackout has been twofold: First, Reddit has lost some of it’s best. The quality of content there is diminished, and will continue to diminish as poor quality drives users away. And second, the Fediverse alternatives have been given a huge boost. Almost all users of Reddit are now aware of the ugly truths that underlie that service, and that there are alternatives out there.
That’s not failure. That’s the seeds of success.
And by the way, I think that’s one thing we can all do to help bring down Reddit: mention the great alternatives out there as much as possible to spread the word. The more Redditors who learn that they don’t have to be a product to be sold by the pound for the stockholder class, the quicker Reddit will fall!
I also bet there are people who haven’t already left that will abandon ship once the TPAs stop working. It’s not going to be fun getting stuck with their mediocre app, particularly since they seem to be testing the end of the mobile site.
For me its really exciting. it is like watching history happen. I am really glad the people have managed to come together for something important.
Yeah I don’t have a strong opinion about whole API access controversy but it does spark a greater debate about how we let centralized services like Reddit subsume the Internet forum culture of old. Of course, Reddit in many ways is a superior product to the decentralized forums of old (you only need one account to post) but at the same time, this whole protest has proven especially damaging to people who rely heavily on Reddit as a resource for support (like the mental health subreddits, the chronic disease ones, etc.).
This is just me, personally, but I hate Reddits stance on the API situation about AI learning, and how it’s not profitable to offer the data for free. Excuse me, the data doesn’t even exist without the users. I get we are all data-harvested, but to completely pull the rug like this is unforgivable. I mean the TPA’s were the only way I interacted with Reddit. For me, it’s not about the ads, the money or anything, it’s deliberately killing the TPA to drive their profits up. I mean fuck, I’d pay a subscription to access reddit if it kept TPA open. But nah, gonna act like they earned my data and are entitled to it, no thanks.
This is probably a dumb comment, sorry. I can’t word very well and I don’t usually get out what’s going through my head
It’s disappointing seeing people cave so quickly when under the slightest inconvenience. It doesn’t matter for me, though - I’m not going back. If anything, this has helped me realize the unhealthy relationship I had with Reddit and was a good way to break that.
To new and better things.
Same. Replacing doom scrolling on Reddit with posting on beehaw.
I started reading Reddit (and now Lemmy) through RSS feeds because I was exhausted from the constant scrolling. I think that’s really helped me cut back on my link-aggregator of choice. The RSS feeds here could use some TLC though – the feeds smoosh the title and url together and if there is any sort of post text, it’s not much to go on.
What RSS feed application are you using? I’m thinking of doing the same. Just pulling in everything from multiple sources into one interface
I use https://reeder.app/ with https://feedly.com account. Checks all the boxes between being able to access my RSS feed on any device (as Feedly has a website) and having a great user experience on my phone / laptop.
Here’s my top 3 in the order I would recommend them:
I’m probably going to delete my account or at least cut back drastically on my usage, but I’m currently the only active mod for a small fan sub for an old fantasy book series. I don’t really want to leave that sub unmoderated but I’ll have to find another user willing to take on mod duties before I feel alright abandoning Reddit altogether.
only active mod for a small fan sub
That attachment is what they (Reddit) are counting on. It’s your community, not Reddits; and they don’t care. But you do… while admirable in itself, its being used against you.
I don’t disagree with you, but I still feel a certain responsibility to that community. I’d like to start divesting myself of that responsibility, but it’ll take time if I don’t want to just abandon it.
From what I understand of how this whole system works here - you can just host/create your own instance for that community. Make some mod post on your subreddit about how you’re migrating the community, if anyone can help host it if you’re unable, and if they want to follow over they can.
Yeah it’s an idea for sure. I responded to @curiosityLynx a minute ago that I’m really burnt out on that particular series so I think it’s probably time for me to find somebody else to take it on and just move on myself.
How about you make a lemmy community or a kbin magazine and officially migrate your subreddit there? (including making a stickied announcement in the subreddit)
Since you’re its only mod, that should be possible and even easier to do than migrating a bigger subreddit like /r/TalesFromTheFrontDesk
I’ve considered it, but honestly I’m kind of tired of it lol. It’s an older series and so all of the arguments/discussions are just kind of retread endlessly, and I’m not as into it as I used to be. Also there are discussions about making a tv show and I wouldn’t mind being as far away as possible once that kicks into high gear. I saw what r/WoT was like when that show came out and I don’t want any part of moderating that crap.
Yeah, the niche subreddits are what I really hate to leave behind. I could care less about leaving r/politics, r/AskReddit, etc. But I’ll miss r/EtrianOdyssey (niche video game series).
But we’ll just have to create these communities on Lemmy. I’m in it for the long haul.
As the only mod, would you be able to export the data to lemmy and inform the users that they can continue posting here? I have no idea, genuinely just interested.
I have no idea whether that would be possible, but I’m also not sure I would want to do it. It would be one thing to encourage folks to move but I don’t own that subreddit (I’m not even the founder or the head mod, just the only one that actively moderates) and I wouldn’t want to grab other folks’ posts and comments and put them elsewhere.
That makes sense. It sounds like you are the right person to be that moderator, so I tip my hat.
Malicious Compliant Deep Thoughts : You could create a group here on Lemmy, start topics and discussions there. Then link those Lemmy posts on Reddit. The Reddit Users will figure it out. :)
What book series?
The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny
Cool, I’ve not read these, so I will add it to my “to read” list!
…an old fantasy book series…
(My ears prick up)
An old fantasy series? I’m big time into old fantasy series. May I ask what it was?
The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny.
Cool! Zelazny is one of my favorite authors. I assume you’ve read his Lord of Light?
Incredibly, I have not. It’s on my TBR list, I’ve just never gotten to it. Pretty bad for somebody moderating a Zelazny fan sub but it is what it is, lol
It’s his magnum opus. Enjoyable as Amber is (and I wish he’d written more), Lord of Light is absolutely incredible. Although a lot of people get confused by the flashback that starts with Chapter 2 and lasts for more than half of the book.
It won’t be the last time reddit fucks up. And everytime they do, more people will come this way, especially as this place gets better and better
It’s disappointing seeing people cave so quickly when under the slightest inconvenience.
The whole protest was slacktivism of the highest order. Minimum effort, minimum results.
Well, give young people some credit, though. Mostly they’re the ones that have been closing their subs and migrating here and working to develop FOSS software like Lemmy. I say this as someone in my late 30s.
I wonder how much of this caving in was, because a lot of lame mods were worried about losing their past time and or control over large communities.
There are a lot of little Lukashenkos out there that will immediately cave to a bully as long as they’re allowed to remain in control.
Then we still win and Reddit still loses. Little Lukashenkos don’t make good moderators.
I’m happy to stay on lemmy. Just like mastodon, it had a boy that will fade but then I think it will continue to grow.
Reddit’s always had inept management, Spez in particular can’t help but antagonise his users with a daft unforced error every couple of years. We don’t need to ‘win’, we don’t even need to actively do anything but exist. As long as nice places like this exist and Reddit does too Reddit’s inevitable cockups will provide a small but steady trickle of users.
Many subreddits are holding polls on whether they should continue the blackout. For those who are boycotting Reddit, I would highly encourage you to go vote. Even if you plan to leave Reddit for good, a longer blackout will drive more users here.
On many subreddits that have polls, it seems like a majority favor keeping their subs open. It seems like the userbase is generally ambivalent or even hostile towards the protest at large.
Makes sense considering everyone who is pro-blackout is not on the site…
IDK I also see plenty of posts supporting keeping subs closed too. I doubt a lot of people have left the site for good. But those voices are generally outnumbered by people who don’t understand what’s going on or don’t care about the protest.
Don’t get me wrong… Lemmy is fine, but I am finding that most of the active posts here are about the protest on Reddit… plus a few discussions on current news and gaming… but little else. I am still spending most of my time on Reddit.
Asking the people still posting/commenting if they want a subreddit to stay open seems kind of pointless. Of course they want it to stay open, they didn’t care for the blackout in the first place.
Because, while we know how shitty Reddit as a company has behaved, there are millions who have no idea (despite the popular posts by mods across thousands of subs) and now feel that the mods and subs which went private/restricted are the ones damaging Reddit, rather than Reddit shooting itself.
To be honest, not that many people seem to actually care and I think this would have gone better if they didn’t announce their “for 48 hours” bullshit. Imagine if the WGA said they were going on strike for two weeks and then getting back to writing. They would accomplish literally nothing.
Subs saying “for 48 hours” is the equivalent to that. If they just went indefinite from the start, they wouldn’t have to be polling people who are now mostly just annoyed that their experience has been unpleasant for two days.
Honestly, as much as I support the whole thing, it went about as well as expected. Mods kind of shot themselves in the foot, now the community blames them.
In a way, those users are right. Either go all in or do nothing. Middle-of-the-road shit doesn’t work for things like this.
Also, the constant image with the black background and large white text saying Reddit sucks (that’s at least how it appears to general users) is becoming literal spam. Regular users see it, and it becomes one of those things where it’s like “we heard you the first dozen times, please shut up”. Also, because it’s being spammed, it loses impact and people gloss over it or filter it out.
At best, they’ll annoy enough people to leave (kind of roundabout way of accomplishing things, but I guess it works). At worst, they’ve given reddit a reason to declare the mods as promoting and engaging in spam which “doesn’t benefit the users of the site, so we’re going to step in and get things back on track so everyone can enjoy Reddit” or some corporate shit.
Honestly, Reddit’s in a position where they may even have the upper hand now in terms of PR. Users angry, but not at them.
The thing is, the people who don’t realize what this is about are going to be having a really rough time in a couple of weeks when moderation slides. Of course, they’re going to blame the mods again and say they’re doing it on purpose because the “protest failed and now you’re just being spiteful and hurting the users”.
We know that’s not the case. The majority doesn’t and won’t care.
I think the real issue is that the protest coordinators were not able to succinctly explain why they had to protest to begin with. Charging third party app developers for API access is an esoteric topic. Most people don’t even know what an API is. Most people don’t use third party apps. Most people also don’t care.
Yeah, I was going to mention that as well.
Longtime users and especially power users and mods have been on third party apps for ages. And because third party apps are the most “visible” examples of the API, that’s what drew the attention.
As soon as they tried to explain “it’s not only about third party apps, but also third party tools”, that’s when they lost people because explaining what those tools are and accomplish to users who aren’t mods (or even familiar with tech at all) becomes a subject without much clarity.
To a massive portion of users, there is no “reddit(dot)com”, it’s just the app. The fact that so many subs are still using titles like “save third party apps” is a bad sign. It’s not “save Reddit from spam bots and other awful shit” (which is one of the things this is mainly about), but you’re telling a bunch of people to “save” apps that they don’t use or care about.
There’s an added cog in the machine here. Every time someone tries (and succeeds) in explaining the issues, the astroturfing (or just regular bootlicking) begins and suddenly there’s seeds of doubt.
One thing we can count on is Reddit fucking up again. And again. And each time, it’ll lose the more active users. It’s not ever going to be a mass migration, but waves over time. Even then, what can we say Reddit will be in another five years? Probably different from what it is now, with users who expect different things.
There’s an added cog in the machine here. Every time someone tries (and succeeds) in explaining the issues, the astroturfing (or just regular bootlicking) begins and suddenly there’s seeds of doubt.
I am seeing many users (especially those who haven’t been around for as long) asking people what the big deal is and why their favorite subreddits are down. Half of the people trying to respond aren’t giving these people satisfactory and succinct answers. The protest is breaking down as soon as it began.
It seems problematic to have a poll to about boycotting when those actively boycotting won’t be there to participate.
Can anyone tell me what the “196” community is? If I sort my feed by All, it gives me a ton of memes from there but I can’t tell what it is.
Left wing queer safe shitposting
It began on reddit as the general sub for the college dorm #196 at some university, one thing lead to another, and now it’s a meme sub which exists everywhere.
The joke is “you have to post something when you visit the subreddit” so the content there is just all over the place, but there are a bunch of in-jokes that spawned (was they always do in situations like that).
I think I’m happy with the outcome. People were always looking for an alternative to Reddit and all that was missing was critical mass. Now the alternatives are totally usable outside of small niches which will catch up eventually.
Reddit is definitely shitting its pants. They used to have zero direct competitors.
Holding strong on not returning to reddit. Using Jeroba for Lemmy for any free time I get, been enjoying it
I do not cross picket lines. Later this week, once the protest is officially over, I plan on going on Reddit, backing up my data using the PowerDeleteSuite another user posted about, and then overwriting and deleting my comments and posts with a message about the protest, before closing my account entirely.
Lemmy has already grown a nice community of people, and I’ll be glad to contribute and watch it grow over time!
Overwrite all your comments with “move to beehaw!”
I’m going with the HD-DVD encryption key. It just feels right to go full circle.
Yeah, I’m on the lemmy.world instance, but I was planning on doing something like that. I’ve heard that some bots have been going around deleting posts that mention Lemmy / the Fediverse though, so I guess we’ll see how it goes. :)
I considered that for mine, but given that replacing all my comments can be taken as hostile, I’d rather not associate them with Lemmy or Beehaw.
I just went with setting every one of my comments to [user data has been purged]
Still holding strong and staying here. Might as well get it over with though, as once RIF is dead, I wouldn’t be browsing reddit anyway.
Stayed off Reddit completely for the last 2 days but checked back in in a couple of the smaller subs I browse today. But I have found I am checking back in here on Lemmy more even now that all the Reddit subs I usually post in are back open. This really feels like a viable alternative to me.
I’ve also stayed off reddit so far, but doing so taught me something. I’m definitely addicted to scrolling reddit on my phone. The number of times I just opened reddit on reflex and then caught myself and killed the app was insane. Even if there’s a miracle and reddit changes their ways, this is something I should probably address.
I decided to jump before I was pushed and binned off Apollo the weekend before the strikes started. This place existing made that jump a lot easier I think!
I imagine the devs have stats on uninstalls - I wonder what they show.
I had the official Reddit app because there was one function that it could do that my 3P couldn’t. But I decided the hell with it and uninstalled it yesterday. I assume I’m not the only one.
And meanwhile, I can’t say that I’m holding strong. I still have no desire to go back to Reddit. No strength is required!
I’d love to be a fly on the wall at Reddit HQ right now in general!
Hi welcome. Have fun with it! It’s new, it’s exciting. It’s less developed but that just leaves tons of room for growth and polish! Reddit was over saturated and stagnant. Embrace the relatively empty pond!
I put the Lemmy web app shortcut where my Rif app used to be on my phone, so my muscle memory from always opening up rif has me going to lemmy instead. I’ve barely been looking at reddit at all and really enjoying seeing these lemmy communities grow. Once rif is gone I don’t plan to use reddit at all (aside from the occasional specific Google search for “specific question reddit”) and I don’t think I’ll miss it.
If you’re considering leaving Reddit, consider also salting the earth on your way out.
Check out PowerDeleteSuite, a Chrome* plugin that can edit/delete posts in a user’s history. https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
Just follow the install instructions on the page and let it rip. You can act on or exempt specific subs, act on age, exempt by status, etc. It will also export deleted and modified comments to a CSV for your own use.
I nuked my accounts, editing all comments to “This comment has been deleted in protest of the Reddit API changes of June 2023. Consider visiting Lemmy.world or Kbin.social for an alternative news source.”
I’ll probably go back in on the 29th or 30th and delete everything before closing the accounts.
worked on Chromium for me. Never had success with Firefox, and I don’t touch Edge.(Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with this project)
Discussion: I arrived at posting this after some soul-searching about destroying inforamtion. In the end, my contributions were derivative from still-extant and viable sources, while I consider Reddit to be a lost cause. I decided it was more abhorrent to me that they continue to profit off the back of my freely-contributed content than to reclaim my contributions, and rehost those contributions at a later date under a more friendly banner.
That was my calculus. You, reader, are welcome respectfully to disagree.
I for one, will most definitely not be doing this. Reddit was such a vital part of the internet during the mid-2010’s to early 2020’s… it would be a shame it all that history was permanently lost.
I will, however, likely not be going back. I’ve actually really wanted to take part in a decentralized social community like this for a long time, and I am very excited about what the federation brings to the table, and about the role that Lemmy fills in that network. In a world where the internet seems so much to focus on what is currently going on now, I reckon not contributing to Reddit anymore will have a much greater long-term impact than nuking my previous content, and will allow me to leave my piece of internet history intact on their archive.
There’s an argument to be made that it’s all been captured in the internet archive, but I still think that reddit gets most of its value from active users, not drivebys looking at posts from a decade ago. I’d rather those vital parts of internet history be findable in their original, SEO captured location, but I also understand the reasoning behind getting rid of all that and moving it strictly into internet archives. The thing is, the 2010s have taught us that the addage “once it’s on the internet it’s there forever” is patently false. The internet has turned out to be incredibly fragile with big chunks of history that wasn’t archived going away forever. Our collective memories have been edited by companies going out of business and deleting all their cloud storage to avoid incurring further cost.
From the perspective of preserving useful knowledge, I wholeheartedly agree that it’s a horrible thing to do. Especially when your comments relate important niche information rather than just being the millionth meme on the same template.
That said, I still edited everything (weren’t too many niche info things on my account anyway), because I read a couple times that Reddit’s big goal here would be to sell the immense amount of “real people conversations” to AI language model companies, thus possibly still making more money off what’s already there even if no new content would be posted again.
PS: I have no idea how or why my phone did this but while typing, a popup suddenly came “Report Created!”. If I somehow reported your (or any other) message here, please ignore this, whoever gets the report!
I’ve thought about deleting specifically noninformative posts
I had the same though. But then I started scrolling through my post and comment history and decided I’d rather do something else with my time than consider whether or not a comment I made will be exactly what someone searches for years from now.
But, I should add, that my valuable contributions on reddit are pretty few. I can see how that would be entirely different for someone who is/was incredibly active in answering r/AskHistorians posts.
Cool, I think I’ll do the same. I wasn’t popular or super active but hey, doin’ my part
Reddit refugee here, anime/manga nerd and mainly shitposting but I also like to engage in Machine Learning and C++/Python discussions.
programming.dev is a great instance for you then!
cool, just subbed to !programming@programming.dev
Have Reddark on a tab. Seems like the number of private subs keeps dropping. :(
Are they caving or is something nefarious up like what happened to r/AdviceAnimals and r/tumblr yesterday?
It’s probably a mix of both. Er, what exactly happened to those subs?
I wouldn’t sweat it, though. Reddit will never recover from the events of the last two days. They’ll be bleeding users from now on.
This isn’t the end for Reddit by a long way but it might in hindsight be seen as when its slow decline reached the point of no return.
I don’t know if it will be the end. But the quality is likely to go down. The power users were using 3rd party apps. And without a lot of those being around. It’s going to go down in quality like Twitter did when Elon acquired it.
What will really kill them is when they officially go public. That will kill the site dead.
I missed the whole Twitter-after-Elon thing. I never really got Twitter, and I was permabanned from it before he acquired it. Ironically, for a Tweet about (among other oligarchs) Elon!
I regretfully still have mine. Mostly because I love sports and a lot of Twitter accounts I follow for news are still active. And accounts like Wario64 for when things go on sale for games or 4K blu-rays. That said, Elon will never get my fucking money.
Neither will spez.
Apparently oligarchs have no sense of humor. Who knew?
What happened to those subs? Admin takeover?
Yes the mods were removed and replaced before the subs were reopened.
Reddark?
It’s a website tracking the subreddits that are private. Here is the link: https://reddark.untone.uk/
I like reddit. I want its fun little spaces to thrive.
Reddit is making this really difficult.
The suits are all about their metrics and engagement and clicks and they don’t care about the user. They don’t even care about the peeps they hire to talk to the user.
I’m told sometimes admin employees find out they’re fired because they can’t log in to workspaces anymore.
I dunno.
Maybe this space is better. :)
*I like reddit. I want its fun little spaces to thrive.
Reddit is making this really difficult.*
Agreed, but I don’t think they’re going to be moving in a positive direction. I believe we have seen the best Reddit will ever be. When a company becomes profit driven in the way Reddit has, it forces the company to make decisions that aren’t beneficial to it’s users. I understand the decisions they’re making, but their “rip the band-aid” method at least lets us see that they’re unwilling to compromise on their position. It makes switching to a different platform much easier for me. It just sucks because there are small communities that I thoroughly enjoyed and I don’t know if they’ll ever recoup.
Looking at the tracker comments seem to reaching parity with posts again, as they were pre-blackout. For the two days of the protest 67% of subs were private, yet posts hardly deviated from the norm - and comments only slightly below. Is the implication that people in subs that didn’t join in like r/news etc just posted/commented that much more in a show of support ha ha ha, or is this a de facto admission that much of the site’s traffic is just bots? Are investors down with that? I haven’t seen this actually hashed out in discussions much.
I think a more realistic implication is that big chunk of reddit content is bots and propagandists.
There is so much bots who repost on reddit it’s a nightmare…
I was wondering about how much of reddit activity is bots. Are bot posts/comments possible with lemmy?
It’s impossible to tell how much of the posts are bots but if you look at the default subreddits I’d say that it’s definitely noticable.
Reddit is a popular grey marketing area - be it shilling products or political propaganda. Lemmy/Federation hasn’t reached enough mass for this to be a real problem yet but it’ll happen eventually and Lemmy is an easy target right now. I used to work in bot detection area and modern, well made bots (the ones you should worry about) are essentially indisguishable from real users but script kiddies can be an issue too.
The only real way to fight bots is to reduce the incentive which is more of a cultural thing - people have to call out shills and a more transparent platform definitely helps.
Sorry for the rant but I think bots/spam will play a big role if federation ever reaches the point where there’s enough eye-balls for shilling to be valuable.
There has to be a way to limit these accounts. Perhaps ban accounts with inhumane levels of activity? If possible, this would be awesome. I think that’s what makes a platform for me - interacting with real humans on topics of mutual interest. It would be such a bonus to have a feed not dominated by bot reposts and inevitable drivel.
Behavior analysis is definitely a popular way to handle this but it’s very difficult and resource intensive. Major issue is false positives as users are hard to predict in flexible environments like forums - is this person interested in all Honda posts as they are researching their new car purchase or they’re shilling for Honda?
It’s tough.
Yes, there’s nothing stopping someone from creating bot accounts on Lemmy and pretty much every other Fediverse platform. Even if APIs are restricted, they can just parse HTML instead (though that’s a bigger pain in the ass). This is an area where the decentralized nature of the Fediverse works in our favor, though, as it inherently limits reach and discoverability (thus minimizing the benefits of doing this). For example, Mastodon’s flagship instance (mastodon.social) had a spambot problem not too long ago, so what happened is when other instances noticed this spam wave, they limited/defederated with mastodon.social and the problem was solved on their end. The host instance can temporarily close off sign-ups to prevent new accounts from being made. Every other instance can control federation to effectively quarantine the spam problem.
The way Reddit has handled this has been so disappointing. Aaron Swartz been rolling over but man look what Reddit has become. I believe now more than ever that any site that revolves around a community should be in the hands of said community and not corporations or else this eventually happens. Corporations need to produce profit to survive but when we’re talking spaces for open discussion that more often than not works against the very community that makes up the content.
I believe now more than ever that any site that revolves around a community should be in the hands of said community and not corporations or else this eventually happens
This is how it used to be before the internet for most people basically became five websites run by enormous faceless data mines. Forums/bulletin boards/IRC channels used to be run by the community for the community and in my opinion the internet was better for it. Sure you’d get the odd flame war or power-tripping mod, but it was super common for a large portion of the community to just up sticks and start a new forum somewhere else if it became too much of a problem. Then Reddit killed most of the hobbyist forums stone dead. There’s nothing to go back to so we have to start fresh. But honestly, I’m here for it. I’m tired of being the product for a bunch of advertisers. Take me back to 2004.
In 2004 I was still running a Usenet server. Online games were run by the community too. I spent so much time on MUDs.
It seems like now we are in this cycle where someone builds something shinier and fancier, it briefly becomes the next best thing, and then they find out it can’t make money (or just survive) unless it becomes significantly worse, and then the next best thing appears. But because of all the steps back there is little real progress. Lemmy too is, functionally, not that different from Usenet. It has pictures and votes and is generally more modern. But what I see highlighted in contrast to reddit is that it’s distributed. Like Usenet. It’s not supposed to be a breakthrough but after reddit it feels like one.
Hopefully it doesn’t get overrun with spam like Usenet did…
I started on Usenet back in the 80s. Those were the days! We had real freedom back then…
We need democracy online. Down with the unelected aristocracy!
