It is so frustrating seeing how people received the protest.
“it’s not working” “Reddit doesn’t care” “they can do whatever they want”.
Well yeah, if that’s the attitude!
How do people not see that the protest disrupted the entirity of Reddit? Just about every weekly active user felt it.
How do they not understand the impact on revenue (especially ads), and how Reddit cannot feasibly sustain it, and were banking on the idea that it’ll eventually die down?
The fact of the matter is, if Reddit became worried that the protest will continue in strength indefinitely, they would be forced to roll back. The loss impact would greatly outweigh whatever measly profits they make from this API change that no one will buy.
Yes, this was a lot more for Reddit than just profits. If Reddit had backed down, it would have impact much greater than just third party apps. It remind people once again that users hold the power when they’re United. They can decide how to run their communities. But Reddit just could not afford this to happen, which is why they fought to convince you that the protest isn’t working and you should back down. And unfortunately many of us did…
I do miss having all my content right there and being able to mindlessly scroll. The fediverse gets better daily but I can’t exist the way I did on Reddit.
That being said, that’s not necessarily a bad thing lol. I deleted my posting account on Reddit and I haven’t logged in days
It’ll take some time, but I think we’ll get there. Lemmy kind of feels like Reddit did to me when I first started using it. Some cool memes, some simple commentary on big news events, cat photos, etc… The biggest thing missing is the critical mass that allows some of the niche communities to come together and be reasonably active. I think Lemmy also needs some refinement on the back-end. Things like user-level blocking of instances(just because I don’t want to see something doesn’t mean I think it needs to be completely defederated), something equivalent to multi-reddits to browse sets of communities/instances, maybe a method to publish/subscribe to user’s blocklists. Can definitely feel the beginning of something awesome, hopefully it works out for a while.
I honestly feel like the 3rd party app space is what is going to bring the features together. If you can have an app that allows multiple accounts from different instances that aggregates posts, maintains custom block lists, and shows you one feed, then that will rival Reddit.
The apps are very bare bones yet, but Jerboa already allows using multiple accounts from different instances, which lets one participate in what can be expected to be groups of instances defederated from the rest.
Aggregating posts might or might not be desirable depending on each case, there are definitely many more options in a federated world.
Multiple feeds are also a missing feature, or what Reddit would call “multirreddits”. Lemmy is also still lacking an export/import feature, or GDPR request compliance. And the backend needs some better horizontal scaling.
There’s really a lot to do, but the upside is, this time it can’t be taken away.