- cross-posted to:
- foss
Please check my post, I think everything I said is very valid, but I want this community to see it too, and help steer the discussion, I think reddit is doing this intentionally.
Please check my post, I think everything I said is very valid, but I want this community to see it too, and help steer the discussion, I think reddit is doing this intentionally.
The benefit is to prevent this from being the next Reddit. Being a nonprofit doesn’t really guarantee anything in the long term. OpenAI was a non profit and now it isn’t… Rather than trust a single entity to not abuse its power, federation aims to not give any entity all the power to begin with.
It also solves practical problems. Which single benign entity would pay for the servers and internet connections to become the new reddit? I don’t think there is one.
Honestly I’m fine with the current process. A site exists for a decade, collapses when it has to be profitable and we all move to the next one. Reddit was my replacement for Digg which was a replacement for slashdot. I’m fine moving every decade to the new site if everything is in one place and easy to use.
That said, I’m sure this platform will be fine once someone makes an app like Apollo to streamline it and 99% of people go to one instance for technology and one instance for politics. I didn’t switch to reddit when it came out (I hated it). I switched when digg became garbage and reddit was the better alternative. I think that will be the case with this as well for most people.
Fair enough. I think it would be more accurate to say that you don’t care about the benefits of federation, rather than there not being any.
But it while you feel fine with the “current process” clearly from an end-user perspective, it’s worth considering how the process might harm you too indirectly. Some communities, especially niche ones, might not survive a migration. An enormous amount of information might eventually get lost if the old site dies or pivots to something that doesn’t retain all the content.
And then there’s all the things that can go wrong with giving all our data to a single entity. Maybe sometime in the future we find ourselves dependent on AI services and they go to shit. Now it’s not obvious that we can keep migrating every decade because only a select few tech giants have the big data required to create competing services. And that sucks because we’re the ones who generated it and gave it away.
Hopefully, the streamlining of the fediverse, which I agree needs to happen, will not be everyone signing on to the same instance, but rather the federation working great and the interfaces feeling so seamless that the average user feels like everything is in the same place without it really being so.
Those are all fair points. I do think these kinks can be worked out. I guess I’m just being impatient because I don’t think the reddit blackout is going to make spez back down which means I’ll need to find an alternative platform by the end of the month when narwhal stops working for me.
I don’t browse Reddit on mobile, but I feel for you guys that do. It must suck. I also don’t think spez will back down, and a transition to Lemmy or other platform will certainly take long, if it happens at all. It’s just so likely that things will suck for a while…