- cross-posted to:
- snoocalypse@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- snoocalypse@lemmy.ml
This is great, many more subreddits should do something like this. But in the end, it’s us, the end users, who should do the actual protesting since it’s us who have the power to change things. I’ve decided not to give them any kind of traffic from now on. Me, by myself, won’t make much impact but if more of us did the same they’d be force to change their strategy.
Subreddits doing this will have a much bigger impact than end users, because large masses of people will never do anything inconvenient on their own. This is the reason why capitalism doesn’t self-regulate for better environmental standards, for an example. The whole personal carbon footprint thing was invented by an oil company to shame individuals so we can blame eachother for our consumption instead of regulating energy companies. Nothing changes if we rely on everyone to do the right thing without any external motivations (be it environmental regulations or closing subreddits).
That’s not to say you shouldn’t also look at your own actions - personally I deleted Apollo on my phone and blocked the reddit domains on my work laptop and home network. But big players (I.e big subreddits) need to be part of the change.
This is a great video on the carbon footprint campaign:
I am so happy to see people coming together and moving away from commercial platforms. It feels silly to say it, but it seems like it is a step in the right direction. It is technological and social progress. Decentralization is a really fantastic tool and it seems to be a system that cannot be controlled internally or externally. Mastodon has been great, and I expect Lemmy to be even better.
To anyone reading, if you have any extra cash, look into making a small donation to your instance. The people running it are not just putting in time, they are likely paying hundreds a month to rent server space.
Money is going to be the deciding factor in the long-term health of the entire Fediverse. More users on each instance means more costs – and to some extent, even users not on that instance will contribute to cost. That money has to come from somewhere, and eventually, if the Fediverse is going to scale up to even a sizable portion of what we’re moving away from, we need real, consistent money involved. It doesn’t have to be full VC corpo junk, but eventually, some instances are going to need a team.
I want this stuff to work great, but expecting the people running it to pay the cost forever isn’t sustainable.
would it be a good idea to have comment/post rewards like gold/silver etc. where the proceeds go to help fund instances?
So… it could work. But that’s not going to be consistent, and the federated nature of things like Lemmy makes for some weird structures. Can you give rewards across instances? What if one instance has “gold” at $1, but another has it at $0.50?
ooo good point. i knew someone smarter than me would elucidate this. danke.
Maybe you have to buy them from the instance you’re using them on?
That starts running into a few issues. It’s high friction (“You mean I have to enter card details every time I want to do this on someone from a new instance?”) and it has some serious risk of disproportionate impacts.
People are usually more willing to spend some money on community projects such as an instance they like. This could be a financially viable way to fund online platforms like Lemmy.
Donations are not consistent, that’s the big trouble. Especially after a big exodus, people may move, and they may donate for a while, but those donations will typically drop off eventually, even if they keep using it.
You’re right that people are usually more willing to spend on community projects, and that’s largely true - but watching open-source software as long as I have, I know that donations rarely cover things in the long-term, and most of the projects that are funded well enough to have a team behind them are actually funded by corporations. Heck, even getting one person able to run an instance as a full time gig is going to be difficult without it turning corporate.
Yeah, consistency is a problem. Perhaps we should implement some sort of Lemmy Coin solution that would allow people to show their appreciation to quality posts and support the instance at the same time.
Federation frustrates that, as well – for cross-instance posts, what’s the split? 50/50? What if one instance is charging $1 per coin, but another is $0.50 per coin, what price becomes paid? How will you even ensure that the split can occur reliably? Heck, how will you handle trying to do that transfer internationally?
I know I’m probably coming across as a downer, but without answering these questions, we don’t have a solution, we just have a patchwork of ideas that people worked on and implemented without every providing anything useful. I want this to succeed, desperately. I’m tired of corporate interests ruining everything – but we can’t succeed at this without figuring out these long-term issues.
Hmm… Those are valid points.
I can’t come up with anything brilliant, so I’ll just give you my mediocre idea instead. Let’s say there’s an “award foundation“ where you can buy “Lemmy gold” and other awards for a fixed piece. When you find a post worthy of the award, the value is spread among everyone involved. One third to your instance, one third to the instance of the recipient of the award and one third to the instance where the conversion was had.
They could add the sites as brave creators and get some revenue from that.Its depends on the number of users but anything helps
Unfortunately, the way federation works means that a 100 user instance that never grows past that can still see cost increases from the ecosystem growing. The number of network effects involved in all of this makes planning for meaningful sustainability a lot more difficult.
Your right. I overlooked the network itself. Thanks for the added perspective 👍
Well said 👏👏
I like the “indefinite” part. Let it stay dark forever and have people make iphone subs in the lemmyverse. The Reddit is dead, long live the Lemmy!
Anything short of indefinite is just a virtue signal, imo.
Agreed
The loss of the forum like help threads will probably be the most impactful thing. We can build communities elsewhere, but the 8 years old post about a problem only you and the OP is having is super valuable.
I’d like to add a comment here just to add some visibility:
If you have an uncapped/unlimited internet connection, you should seriously consider running the Archive Team Warrior
They’re heavily involved in scraping and archiving data from all over the internet (and, recently, most/all of Reddit) so that it’s preserved, regardless of what happens to the underlying platform.
I run it on my home server in docker, but they have a lot of options for doing so and it basically requires just running it, and then forgetting it exists.
It can also be ran as an appliance in a virtual machine like VirtualBox!
Awesome, going to set this up later at home today!
There was talk of someone populating a Lemmy instance with reddit data.
There is a lot of reddit data on a torrent somewhere aparrently.
Not only that. But if Reddit really suffers badly from this it might also have an impact on small communities. It’s really simple to set up a community on any topic on there. And it’s currently mainstream enough that you can get people on-boarded pretty quickly.
Larger communities may find a new home elsewhere. But for smaller ones that feels much more difficult.
Thanks to last week’s fiasco I discovered the fediverse and hopefully others too. I just hope it’s intuitive enough that people don’t get scared away.
That’s the thing that bothered me the most about deleting my account. I had multiple people say thanks for posting solutions and problems with solutions I had, even years later. Not specific to iphone but in general.
Good thing I’ve never been of any use to anyone then :)
… :'(
I feel that. I posted about a Plex problem 2 years ago and the subsequent solution I worked out. Every once in a while I still get someone replying to that and thanking me.
My hope is that things like Chat GPT can now become that source. I can only assume all those historical posts were used as training data.
ChatGPT doesn’t understand the things it says. It shouldn’t be treated as a source of truth. It can be tripped up by nuance, or by statements which require an understanding of the concept of syntax. For example, if you ask it what is the longest 5-letter word, it will confidently give you an answer.
I wish more people understood this. So many people out there are taking what ChatGPT spits out as gospel when it’s actually very susceptible to manipulation and misinformation.
Here is what GPT 4 says:
Me: What is the longest 5-letter word?
ChatGPT:
The concept of the “longest” 5-letter word can be interpreted in two ways:
-
If “longest” refers to the physical length of the word (how it is pronounced), then it can vary based on different accents and languages. However, in English, five-letter words with a large number of syllables such as “queue” or “eerie” might be considered.
-
If “longest” refers to the word with the most definitions or uses, it’s hard to definitively state which 5-letter word that would be, but “round” and “sound” are examples of five-letter words with a large number of definitions and uses.
It’s also important to note that in English, all 5-letter words contain the same number of letters and would, therefore, have the same length if written in the same font and size.
words with a large number of syllables such as “queue” or “eerie” might be considered.
Lol
-
That’s a problem with every non-physical storage of data/knowledge - it’s ephemeral and can disappear anytime
From time to time I do think about the Carrington Event and wonder what would happen if something like that happened in today’s time. Because of exactly the reason of how reliant we are on electronical data.
How resilient is our infrastructure really? Especially satellites used for communication. I assume that most critical cold-storage is mostly fine. But all the small personal electronic devices will probably be toast.
Physical media can suffer the same fate, but not usually at the hands of a single entity.
The Reddit community from which
!196@lemmy.blahaj.zone is an offshoot from does this.They went dark indefinitely (until (or if) the API changes are cancelled/undone.
It’s a shame promoting Lemmy isn’t part of the blackout
It’s been attempted in various spots, but either reddit itself removes the mentions or edits them out
Yeah the fact that they actually banned the kbinmigration subreddit is absolutely WILD to me. I made a comment on a post a couple of weeks ago now about how this wouldn’t change anything, and a few people would leave like the last time they did something that made people upset, but most people would stay. After the ama and everything last week though I’ve completely changed my mind, I was wrong.
You weren’t wrong. Reddit has over 400 million monthly users. A tiny percentage of that will move to Lemmy. Less than 1% this year is my guess.
That’s a huge number to move to Lemmy, but to reddit it probably represents nothing much.
They delete comments referencing lemmy
Is that really something that’s been happening?
deleted by creator
https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-edit-comments
He’s done this type of thing in the past, and nothing about his current state of behavior makes me think he’s unwilling to do so again.
My comment just got downvoted, but it’s still there (and has reactions of other migratees to lemmy, so not invisible).
I’ve been promoting Lemmy for the past few days and have gotten my comments removed and downvoted by people claiming that Lemmy was a far left recruiting ground for domestic terrorism lmao
I know, right?
I’m an INTERNATIONAL terrorist, thank you very much.
I’m not about to destroy my OWN country… my government at least does THAT for me!
😄
True that. Kinda weird actually to go dark but not providing alternative avenue.
Lol I can’t wait till this is national news, right before they go for their IPO.
I’m glad some subreddits are going dark for good, not only will this actually hurt reddit as a company but also it will lead to some people switching to alternatives like lemmy which is always a good thing.
One thing Reddit did right was that it kept your content. Even if you were permanently suspended, you could go in and view your posts. This differs from, e.g., Google where you see people lose all their life’s memories because they got locked out of their account.
I imagine that there are many people who don’t even have a Reddit account, but casually browse it just because there’s so much info in there.
But the users own that content, not Reddit. The best thing to do is to migrate by deleting your content from Reddit and moving it elsewhere. Once a critical mass of content is lost, Reddit’s value drops tremendously.
Who would care when Reddit admins take over and forcibly reopen r/iPhone, if there are no posts left in the subreddit?
the best thing to do is to migrate by deleting your content from Reddit and moving it elsewhere
That’s not really realistic for the type of content that is Reddit. It’s not like blogs or videos or photos that the majority of people have on Reddit. Most people’s “content” on Reddit are bookmarks/links or comments in a discussion threads.
It doesn’t make sense to just re-share a dump of all the links you once shared on Reddit even if you have a list of them.
It also doesn’t make sense to re-share comments out of their discussion context else where.
Do we know for sure that deleted content on reddit is actually deleted? It’s not unheard of for things to just get a “deleted” flag in the database to stop displaying them, while still keeping the original content. Restoring deleted content would be fairly simply if that were the case.
If they don’t delete your data entirely, it’s a major CCPA and GDPR violation.
I’m not familiar with the details of the CCPA, but AFAIK under GDPR you need to actually request the deletion of data by invoking article 17. Just going through your account and deleting posts is not the same thing.
Also, this only applies to “personal data”. You’d probably need to ask a lawyer if posts on reddit can be deemed to be personal data on principle, but IMO as long as the posts don’t contain any personal identifiable data themselves, it should be enough to remove the username linked to the data like reddit is currently doing if you delete your account. The data would then no longer be linked to an individual and therefore would no longer be personal data.
IANAL, this is just my personal interpretation and I might very well be wrong.
!iphone@lemmy.ml is one offspring
I’m worried that all the new large communities are hosted at a single instance, lemmy.ml
the only thing that’s worrying me about the subreddits closing indefinitely (even though I wholeheartedly support it), is that people are going to use even more closed off, unsearchable platforms as alternatives. /r/unixporn mods say their only “official” alternative is currently their Discord “server”.
edit: the message on /r/iPhone also directs people to their Discord. sigh.
I second this. For a while, adding “reddit” to every google search gives generally better results. Now all this information will become hidden in unsearchable places.
Which is a good case against the centralization of information.
I have been way to comfortable just using Reddit as my source of information with the usage of 3rd party applications.
What if Reddit puts the subreddits behind a paywall?
What if Reddit is gonna demand that every subreddit generates an x percentage revenue just to exist?
What Reddit has shown with their actions is that they are gonna put monetization of their userbase first and user experience somewhere in 10th.
The possibilities to screw the users in regards of the information they consume is…worrying.
It will end up the same as 9gag did. Some weird facebook/instagram/tik tok clone used for people who have an attention span of 60 seconds.
I hope that this protest does something
I’m sceptical. If most subs only protest for 2 days, then all Reddit has to do is weather the storm and then continue on. The only way I see it having any further impact is if many large subs black out indefinitely.
Reddit would either be forced to make concessions or escalate even further by removing the mods of the protesting subs and forcing it open again. That would be a further sign of bad faith and really piss off all these mods that spent up to a decade doing moderation for free.
I hope there’s enough information there for refugees to arrive here safely
It’s more complicated than signing up for Reddit, but really just by 1 degree.
I’m lurking Reddit a bit on Apollo still and see so many posts that have “Grandma trying to figure out a smartphone” energy making it seem like some insurmountable task, or complaining about the questionnaire without stopping to realize what a tidal wave of signups is happening.
Perhaps it’s for the best. If people can’t be bothered for something so simple, they might not be good fits anyways.
There have been some privacy concerns regarding Lenny’s implementation (deleted posts and whatnot). Which has kept some users second-guessing the change. I have tried aether before coming here, but sadly, there are not enough people there.
I just hope that the community from Reddit doesn’t spread itself out too much :(
I just hope that the community from Reddit doesn’t spread itself out too much :(
Why? Decentralisation is a good thing.
Decentralisation is a good thing.
Only if the community and information don’t get fragmented into smaller and smaller hard to find places.
You mean, like Discord? There’s decentralisation which works (Fediverse) and decentralisation which doesn’t (gated/closed off communities like Discord).