A number of instances defederated from it because… well, the reason a number of people are here is to not be on Reddit and seeing a mass deluge of content ported from Reddit defeats that purpose. There other other reasons too, like the fact it makes a ton of submissions and each has very few if no comments leading to the impression of a very barren community.
Yep, notwithstanding the poor tooling on Reddit’s end. I don’t even think the developer portal was fully functional and ready for production use when the pricing was announced. In fact, Christian had to implement his own API tracking back-end to get a good picture of how many API calls Apollo was making because this information wasn’t readily and transparently available from Reddit’s developer tools.
Imagine charging for an API but not making it easy for your collaborating developers to know how much of the API they are using and will therefore be billed for.
Generally speaking, responsible stewardship of a service involves a tail of wind-down and end of life support. It gives time for people to adjust to new services and/or set-ups, troubleshoot the transitions, and provide some lingering support while the service is deprecated.
As another example, Christian was willing to try to find a way to make Reddit’s new API pricing work, but would likely need a good amount of time (say, maybe 6-8~ months of notice) to be able to refactor the application to minimize API calls, trial out new subscription tiers, and figure out what to do for the lifetime users. Instead, he got 30~ days of advance notice after repeated promises that the pricing would not be like Twitter (a lie) and/or no major changes to the API in 2023 (also a lie).
At the end of the day, the people leading these efforts want to end on a good note so they can point to their work as an example of their skills for future opportunities. It is not a good look, where in the face of a belligerent collaborator (i.e. Reddit leadership), one responds in a belligerent manner. Even if Reddit leadership is well deserving of scorn, responding in kind does not create a great professional image.
BotDefense (and many other third party tools) for Reddit were built for its community members, not for Reddit the corporation, which is to say the “client” here are Reddit moderators and community members. In that regard, the developers are adopting good practices for their primary clientele.
Any big major for profit company embracing federation is purely for their own revenue generating goals and have no explicit want to be actually good stewards of the Internet, its communities, and about their participation.
Participating in Federation is another way for Meta to suck up as much data as it can to sell its advertising services.
The content porting really only means something when it’s not overwhelming and the person doing the content porting is actively planning to participate in the submissions.
The easiest way to get someone to not comment on something is a wall of submissions with a fair number of upvotes and few to no comments. At this point, it’s just a glorious RSS feed rather than an actual community.
Driving user growth actually requires putting in the leg work to make meaningful submissions, following-up on them, commenting on submissions, and upvoting content. All of this takes actual effort though. A bot content porting content from Reddit to Lemmy doesn’t do much and for a number of people, looks much more like artificial engagement rather than any meaningfully sincere attempt at growing a community.
Some of the (World/US) News and Politics related communities are so barren of comments despite the deluge of content porting submissions, while other communities have blown up into their own distinct thing because people are making sincere, organic (enough) submissions.
macOS has had free upgrades since OS X Mavericks in 2013. Yea we can squirrel around the specificity of this (e.g. is it really free if you have to pay $99 to update Parallels?) but in pragmatic terms the actual OS has largely been free for consumer use.
I generally get the idea being communicated, but its content is so out of date at this point.
As long as websites/advertisers see their visitors as using a Chromium based browser they will continue to target for Chromium, regardless of whatever front facing UI is used.
The inherent problem is Google has an outsized voice in Chromium’s developmental trajectory, and any major changes to Chromium will have downstream impacts, whether in actual implemented feature sets or forks making continued modifications on top.
The best way to protest is to not use a Chromium browser. Switching from Chrome to another Chromium browser is at best a side grade; everyone using Chromium is subject to Google’s whimsy.
Pragmatically it doesn’t matter if Microsoft chooses not to implement it; as long as Edge is on Chromium, Google can leverage this to continue to bully the web to their own devices.