I just saw this post over on r/modcoord which is basically a massive list of subreddits participating in the blackout protest. If I’m being honest I haven’t seen this much anger and coordinated frustration since the era right before the digg exodus.
Assuming more and more subreddits join in, it’s going to send a pretty massive message to the users who interact with a blacked out subreddit. Then I’m trying to imagine what happens if after a massive coordinated blackout, Reddit continue on the current trajectory. Is Lemmy even prepared to handle the amount of potential incoming traffic that API closure could lead to? It’s absolutely bonkers to me that the Reddit team might just stay the course…
The blackouts will make no difference to Reddit’s plans. The API charge will come in. The content creators and moderators will leave. The content will go stale. The smart shareholders will cash in early; the dumb ones will hang on for the prospect of a greater return which won’t materialise. Once the content is stale, the readers and lurkers will leave. Reddit will become a has-been, a memorable item of internet history like so many other sites.
Not just stale content. But with fewer mods, and the mods that do remain having fewer and less effective tools to do their job, there will be a lot more trolls and spam. The stale content is the lesser problem, really.
Hot take from me: They were planning to just add ads into the API, remove NSFW so that ad agencies don’t get mad and maybe put a more modest premium to access the API.
They spark the outrage then basically paint users and subreddits that supported the blackout as ‘heroes’ when the walk back the changes partially and exclaim “We did it Reddit!”. All when it would have been the plan from the get-go. The silence from their reasons behind this has me very suspicious of something like this.
This is the way it will go down.
It’s a shame.
I do have to wonder if Reddit knows something we don’t… This is… wayyy too much to ignore. I assume they’ve done analysis of the worse cases and mass user departure. The only reason I can assume they’re not backing down is due to the very high upfront costs of Reddit. Less users = less costs which theoretically means more profit. You have a very good point, and its something all Lemmy server owners need to be prepared for, which is a huge influx of users joining on the blackouts, even then, it may not be enough, unintentional DDOS attacks are still DDOS attacks. This is a golden opportunity of a lifetime for Lemmy, but I fear with even a 10th of Reddits current userbase, Lemmy admins won’t be able to keep up… I feel for all the developers and admins that make Lemmy possible, and I really hope it goes well for everyone involved. Donate to server admins and the main project if you have a few dollars spare, or if anyone is comfortable with coding I’m sure they need some devs.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) English22•1 year ago
Reddit knows something we do know: that Lemmy is still young and still has some serious issues with scaling. By pulling the plug and dumping that many people on Lemmy now, all those people will be met with an error page instead of a viable Reddit alternative, driving them back to Reddit.
I can only hope it doesn’t actually play out like this…
This was my initial experience. Tried Lemmy, it wouldn’t let me sign up. Back to reddit. Tried again a day later (yesterday) on a different instance and it worked. People who aren’t so persistent might not try again though 🤷♂️
I saw one of the Lemmy devs say they’re a little unprepared cause they’re working on a pretty big performance overhaul still.
Timing is critical with these kind of migrations and if a lot of people flock to Lemmy just to have it croak at the new load it could really turn people off of Lemmy before they can even try it
Reddit knows they have sudo access, and that ultimately the upset users are not that large, just fairly vocal, and won’t miss them. They’re probably planning to let this play out and know they can force the subs open again with new moderators if it comes to it. I think they’re banking on most users merely being annoyed that their favorite subs are closed for a day and then forgetting all about it.
I think they’re banking on most users merely being annoyed that their favorite subs are closed for a day and then forgetting all about it.
if they are it’s a good approach: look no further than climate protests for how people get when they are even mildly inconvenienced even though it’s the literal existence of the planet we’re talking about there. a lot of ordinary people love protest–as long as it literally never affects them in any way, and they never have to see it or hear about it. they’re probably not going to like it when it’s something this… banal.
I do have to wonder if Reddit knows something we don’t…
I’m hoping for the best, but fearing the worst as far as Reddit goes. I wouldn’t be surprised if they did the math and just don’t care.
Reddit knows something we don’t
they know that they can circumvent moderators’ lockdown and make subreddits public at will and sack the mods who don’t agree with the change, and they’ll still have tons of people willing become a moderator for the sense of pride and accomplishment that you get from ruling your tiny little castle.
I’ve got my popcorn ready for whatever happens down there.
popcorn tastes good.
Me too, here we go!
Honestly, I want Reddit to fail altogether and have people flood into Lemmy by hosting their own instances. It’s like ripping off the band-aid, it’s just better to get on with it.
My account is 17 years old and predates the first digg migration (before the giant digg v4). It’s been a downhill run for a while but sometime after the Boston bombing debacle it’s seemed much more aggressively moderated and curated, much less “free” and less tolerant of opinions or thoughts that fall outside of the “hive mind”.
I use it less and less anyway. I get that the API was abused to violate folks privacy wishes(ie:pushshift ) and feed larger corps coffers with ad data. And I get that a response is to ad some charge. But their general direction has seemed to be circling a toilet so to speak
It always felt to me like there was just a huge shift in the entire reddit culture. At some point, everything changed and it was no longer the same. The users all got worse, the moderation got worse, reddits decision making got worse. The site is nothing like it was when I joined in 2013.
Agree. But I can’t find a specific inflection point. I still recall one of my first comments was some low effort smarmy joke that would engender upvotes on digg, and thus must have been good for Reddit. And the only response was something like “we don’t really do that here bud”
And they were right. The culture was much closer to say news.ycombinatir.com now, but with much more open subject matter.
I do know they changed how quickly things can be put on the front page after Boston. And then clearly there were things that were selectively placed there and suddenly certain, if not most subreddits couldn’t be on the front page. So that’s the main place I can point to that changed the type of content and culture from one of a popular vote to a more delayed and curated narrative.
I’m okay with it dying at this point.
To my knowledge they (reddit) are working on getting pushshift back to work and large companies mining data do so by scraping the website, not through api
They axed Pushshifts API access because the dude was unresponsive. Which is par for the course. It was down for days at a time often. At one point he mentioned you could opt out of pushift crawls, but signing up for a google survey with your username. But then never opted anyone out, so everyone got crawled.
Guy is a bit of a scumbag. Im glad his access was cut.
The last reddit hug of death?
Most of the subs I follow now are planning a black out. Several of them have implied or even outright said they’ll make it indefinite unless Reddit changes their plan
So is there any way for me to help in terms of load distribution? Still figuring out this federated stuff.
Let’s say beehaw for example.
I don’t think (?) I want to create my own instance to moderate or whatever, but am I able to create an instance which is like a node to help with load/volume?
Or is that a matter of beehaw needing beefier servers/bandwidth? Meaning it comes down to financial contribution (which I’ve already set a monthly donation for).
If you introduce people to Lemmy, direct them to smaller instances to sign up on.
Only thing I’ll say is you still have to pick carefully cause you’re also picking a mod/admin team.
Not sure I’d say “careful”… more of “don’t get too comfortable”. As the dust clears I’d expect some/many of the new instances to shutdown. Likely due to hitting server resource limits, or admin motivation limits :)
Yeah there’s a bunch. See https://join-lemmy.org/instances and there are several there to choose from.
Im kinda worried for the amount of NSFW subs that will be gone forever. And most instances here don’t allow NSFW in the first place.
Absolutely. I joined lemmy.ca months ago before beehaw because I got bored of waiting for Reddit’s potato to start working again. With a major portion of Reddit forced down in solidarity for two days, I think many will similarly have a gander at lemmy while they wait for any move from Reddit.
I’m hoping if our part of the Fediverse can ride that wave without crashing too much, Lemmy instances all over will explode in popularity starting the 12th. If the admins are trying to migrate to a better scalable or better value platform (@alyaza), they should do it before then. Other instances should request funding in preparation as well…
@mrcleansocks if Lemmy alone cannot take the flow (although more and more instances are set up, so the impact should be aleviated), people can also go to kbin or (if someone is okay with having a more spartan alternative) to Lotide.
Honestly, with VC money at stake, it would surprise me if there wasn’t a team of people already hired to degrade and interfere with a mass migration to Lemmy.