NP: I think that we are in an absolute moment of change for what you might call the Web 2.0 era. Have you thought about “I’m just going to take my users and go build a Reddit for ActivityPub”?
DP: Even more specifically, one thing a lot of users have been saying is, “We’re leaving Reddit; we’re gonna go to Lemmy and Kbin!” Those are the two that I keep hearing about. Is there a move that way that you think is real, that you might want to be part of?
Apollo dev: It’s tricky because, to a certain extent, that does sound really interesting. But with Mastodon, for instance, I love it, but I’ve seen so many people — even in the tech community, who totally have the means to make that move if they want to — who have just been too intimidated or just can’t get off Twitter for some reason. In the back of my head, I’m like, if these people who are much smarter than me can’t make that change, is this just like a short-term thing?
It’s hard for me to build another thing. If it just evaporated again, it would be like a double breakup. This has been so exhausting for the last few months. The amount of work it would take to port all the API endpoints over to Lemmy or Kbin or something, that would be a gargantuan amount of work that I’m not sure I have the capacity for. And then just the complexity of making it work. Long term, it’s a big question mark for me that, at this stage, I’m not sure I’m totally interested in pursuing. But it’s also one of those things where I completely wish it the best. And if something that was decentralized kind of became the norm, I think that would definitely be a win for everybody.
He does not seem interested at the moment
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759180/reddit-protest-private-apollo-christian-selig-subreddit
NP: I think that we are in an absolute moment of change for what you might call the Web 2.0 era. Have you thought about “I’m just going to take my users and go build a Reddit for ActivityPub”?
DP: Even more specifically, one thing a lot of users have been saying is, “We’re leaving Reddit; we’re gonna go to Lemmy and Kbin!” Those are the two that I keep hearing about. Is there a move that way that you think is real, that you might want to be part of?
Apollo dev: It’s tricky because, to a certain extent, that does sound really interesting. But with Mastodon, for instance, I love it, but I’ve seen so many people — even in the tech community, who totally have the means to make that move if they want to — who have just been too intimidated or just can’t get off Twitter for some reason. In the back of my head, I’m like, if these people who are much smarter than me can’t make that change, is this just like a short-term thing?
It’s hard for me to build another thing. If it just evaporated again, it would be like a double breakup. This has been so exhausting for the last few months. The amount of work it would take to port all the API endpoints over to Lemmy or Kbin or something, that would be a gargantuan amount of work that I’m not sure I have the capacity for. And then just the complexity of making it work. Long term, it’s a big question mark for me that, at this stage, I’m not sure I’m totally interested in pursuing. But it’s also one of those things where I completely wish it the best. And if something that was decentralized kind of became the norm, I think that would definitely be a win for everybody.
That’s sad. Maybe he can Open Source it as a deceased project then someone else can do the migration work.