Following Reddit announcing its new API costs for developers that are killing third-party apps like Apollo, one of the most...
  • Xandolas@beehaw.org
    74·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • cstine@lemmy.uncomfortable.business
      29·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • nhgeek@beehaw.org
      20·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • uthredii@beehaw.org
      18·
      1 year ago

      There was talk of someone populating a Lemmy instance with reddit data.

      There is a lot of reddit data on a torrent somewhere aparrently.

    • woodenskewer@beehaw.org
      11·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • gorogorochan@lemmy.world
      10·
      1 year ago

      That’s a problem with every non-physical storage of data/knowledge - it’s ephemeral and can disappear anytime

      • exhuma@beehaw.org
        6·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • SterlingVapor@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 year ago

          Well, not only did this very nearly happen (a comparable size emission missed us by something like 12 hours), we have a pretty good idea what would happen.

          Fires. Fires everywhere. Very little of our infrastructure is shielded, so basically everything would go offline… But that almost pales in comparison to the sheer number of fires started simultaneously

          We do have hardened installations and a system to give a short warning to places in a position to unplug and protect certain equipment, but that doesn’t matter much in the short term because everything is on fire, and the air is filled with the toxic petrochemical gases we’ve been convinced to build everything out of.

          Whoever survives the early days would theoretically be in a position to rebuild thanks to organizations like the US military - the knowledge of how is protected and there are plans to restore order. Most basic military hardware would be usable with maintenance (unlike most vehicles which rely on a bunch of microchips that don’t appreciate EMPs, and also fire)

      • pbjamm@beehaw.org
        3·
        1 year ago

        Physical media can suffer the same fate, but not usually at the hands of a single entity.

    • exhuma@beehaw.org
      7·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • milkytoast@beehaw.org
      4·
      1 year ago

      yep. this is why i might still occasionally use reddit after this. r/askmechanics was so incredibly useful

    • jimmyjoners@lemmy.world
      31·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
        25·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • femboy_link.mp4@beehaw.org
          13·
          1 year ago

          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.

        • Eheran@lemmy.fmhy.ml
          2·
          1 year ago

          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:

          1. 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.

          2. 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.

        • ddh@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Agreed. However, often when trying to fix something you have run out of options and just want new ideas. In my experience, LLMs are very good for that.

      • gdbjr@beehaw.org
        3·
        1 year ago

        I made sure to delete all my Reddit data before deleting my account. Not getting anything from me.

    • bit0fun@beehaw.org
      30·
      1 year ago

      It’s been attempted in various spots, but either reddit itself removes the mentions or edits them out

      • Riyria
        20·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • Dave@lemmy.nz
          12·
          1 year ago

          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.

    • LlamaSutra@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      1 year ago

      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

      • Cliffjumper@lemmy.world
        4·
        1 year ago

        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!

        😄

  • worfamerryman@beehaw.org
    41·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • sydneybrokeit@beehaw.org
      7·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • mrchuckles@beehaw.org
        2·
        1 year ago

        would it be a good idea to have comment/post rewards like gold/silver etc. where the proceeds go to help fund instances?

        • sydneybrokeit@beehaw.org
          4·
          1 year ago

          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?

            • sydneybrokeit@beehaw.org
              2·
              1 year ago

              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.

      • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
        2·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • sydneybrokeit@beehaw.org
          4·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
            1·
            1 year ago

            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.

            • sydneybrokeit@beehaw.org
              3·
              1 year ago

              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.

              • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
                2·
                1 year ago

                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.

      • JoeKrogan@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        They could add the sites as brave creators and get some revenue from that.Its depends on the number of users but anything helps

        • sydneybrokeit@beehaw.org
          5·
          1 year ago

          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.

  • ivlarac@beehaw.org
    31·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • boonhet@lemm.eeEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      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.

  • phoenixz@lemmy.ca
    29·
    1 year ago

    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!

    • myk@beehaw.orgEnglish
      33·
      1 year ago

      It will. It will make the mods and the power-users realise that Reddit don’t care and won’t change course. Then it’s up to them.

      • CheshireSnake@lemmy.oneEnglish
        18·
        1 year ago

        I completely agree. Reddit has shown no indication of backing down. They will just wait for it to finish if the lockdown is as short as ~48 hours. If a major/big sub goes on lockdown indefinitely, they’ll open it and replace the mods. I’m pretty sure there are tons of people out there willing to mod a big subreddit like r/videos for one reason or another. The reddit of the digg migration era is gone. It’s just corporate reddit now.

    • brandonmarkb@beehaw.org
      6·
      1 year ago

      Agree. I ended up deleting my 11+ year old account. I was holding out that they’d reverse course but I felt like they also need to see some users leaving as well.

  • Provenscroll@sh.itjust.works
    13·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • comfy
      2·
      1 year ago

      If you just mean /r/196 in general, there are already a few different clones and offshoots here.