• 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

      • But for smaller ones that feels much more difficult.

        I guess that’s kind of the beauty of federation here. If somebody is brought in for other stuff, they’ll likely see when their hobby/niche/etc community becomes a thing because surely somebody else will subscribe to something on that server

      • 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.

        • 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)

      • 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.

        •  Eheran   ( @Eheran@lemmy.fmhy.ml ) 
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          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.

  • 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.

    • 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.

        • 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.

            • 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.

              • 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.

  • 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   ( @boonhet@lemm.ee ) 
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      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.

  • One thing Reddit did right was that it kept your content. Even if you were permanently suspended, you could go in and view your posts. This differs from, e.g., Google where you see people lose all their life’s memories because they got locked out of their account.

    I imagine that there are many people who don’t even have a Reddit account, but casually browse it just because there’s so much info in there.

    But the users own that content, not Reddit. The best thing to do is to migrate by deleting your content from Reddit and moving it elsewhere. Once a critical mass of content is lost, Reddit’s value drops tremendously.

    Who would care when Reddit admins take over and forcibly reopen r/iPhone, if there are no posts left in the subreddit?

    • the best thing to do is to migrate by deleting your content from Reddit and moving it elsewhere

      That’s not really realistic for the type of content that is Reddit. It’s not like blogs or videos or photos that the majority of people have on Reddit. Most people’s “content” on Reddit are bookmarks/links or comments in a discussion threads.

      It doesn’t make sense to just re-share a dump of all the links you once shared on Reddit even if you have a list of them.

      It also doesn’t make sense to re-share comments out of their discussion context else where.

    • Do we know for sure that deleted content on reddit is actually deleted? It’s not unheard of for things to just get a “deleted” flag in the database to stop displaying them, while still keeping the original content. Restoring deleted content would be fairly simply if that were the case.

        • I’m not familiar with the details of the CCPA, but AFAIK under GDPR you need to actually request the deletion of data by invoking article 17. Just going through your account and deleting posts is not the same thing.

          Also, this only applies to “personal data”. You’d probably need to ask a lawyer if posts on reddit can be deemed to be personal data on principle, but IMO as long as the posts don’t contain any personal identifiable data themselves, it should be enough to remove the username linked to the data like reddit is currently doing if you delete your account. The data would then no longer be linked to an individual and therefore would no longer be personal data.

          IANAL, this is just my personal interpretation and I might very well be wrong.

      • Deleting your content is letting reddit off easy. Thats why I plan on editing every comment I’ve ever made with something like. "This comment was removed in retaliation of reddit’s 3rd party api strategy. I suggest using alternatives like lemmy,etc " On a 10 year old acount and 1000’s of comments, a lot of people are going to see that when coming across old threads.

    • I think so. With the end of Apollo, I have no other way to access Reddit except their mobile website or their app. I have the feeling it’s too late now, Apollo is unlikely to come back, regardless of what Reddit does. Now, I just hope kbin / lemmy will grow enough to become a good alternative (still learning how everything works ^^).

      • Yes, Kbin/lemmy needs enough good and original content to flourish. What I currently miss is the niche subreddits on lemmy. For specific brands or particular products or hobbies it’s easy to find a community on reddit, but there are only a few already available on lemmy.

          • Even if a community exists for the content you seek, how do you determine the one that is going to grow? There could be a different version of that community on every server, which is the area I’m struggling to find content. Join every alternative is an option.

            Unless there is something I’m missing. Quite possible as the federated approach is all new to me.

            • I don’t expect the duplication to be too much more of an issue here than Reddit. The only big difference is that duplicate forums can have the same name here. I mean, how many meme subreddits were there? At least for me on beehaw, when I search for communities it shows how many subscribers there are. In this period of rapid growth, it’s certainly a bit of a crapshoot and you may need to regularly search communities to see if any take off, but I expect in the next month or so, some communities will become large and their duplicates will pretty clearly die, just like with Reddit.

        • What is stopping you from creating lems for things that you’re passionate about? We have an opportunity here to create a true alternative to reddit, and the more cozy we make it for r/efugees, the better the transition can eventually go!

  • the only thing that’s worrying me about the subreddits closing indefinitely (even though I wholeheartedly support it), is that people are going to use even more closed off, unsearchable platforms as alternatives. /r/unixporn mods say their only “official” alternative is currently their Discord “server”.

    edit: the message on /r/iPhone also directs people to their Discord. sigh.

      • Which is a good case against the centralization of information.

        I have been way to comfortable just using Reddit as my source of information with the usage of 3rd party applications.

        What if Reddit puts the subreddits behind a paywall?

        What if Reddit is gonna demand that every subreddit generates an x percentage revenue just to exist?

        What Reddit has shown with their actions is that they are gonna put monetization of their userbase first and user experience somewhere in 10th.

        The possibilities to screw the users in regards of the information they consume is…worrying.

        It will end up the same as 9gag did. Some weird facebook/instagram/tik tok clone used for people who have an attention span of 60 seconds.

        • no it’s not, because now you just can’t really find this kind of information unless you know which discord server you have to join. STOP USING DISCORD AS A WIKI

      • Also what happens when a ton of users delete their content, as I just did yesterday. I participated in quite a bit of tech support chat on reddit, and now all of that is gone.

    • Not that I think it would happen, but I wonder if Discord could theoretically make publicly discoverable servers directly visible and indexable online?

      Discord already has and maintains a web accessed variant of the platform. It’d require some UI for users not logged in and users not registered with a particular publicly visible server, but I’d wager it’s possible. Probably a nightmare to revamp the back-end to make it possible, but possible. It’d kinda feel like how Twitter is indexed and publicly searchable, but platform registration is required to participate, with Discord having the extra layer of server membership on top of a platform account.

      It’d probably do nothing about servers that fall in a sort of visibility limbo, though, like servers that are significantly populated but invisible to Discord’s server discovery. Still, I like to daydream that kind of thing would put a dent on the platform’s information visibility issues 🤔.

    • I own a subreddit that I’ll admit that it isn’t the largest but I’m going to be putting a link to the new corresponding Kbin magazine in the private message. I’m hoping other subreddits will as well

    • It’s more complicated than signing up for Reddit, but really just by 1 degree.

      I’m lurking Reddit a bit on Apollo still and see so many posts that have “Grandma trying to figure out a smartphone” energy making it seem like some insurmountable task, or complaining about the questionnaire without stopping to realize what a tidal wave of signups is happening.

      Perhaps it’s for the best. If people can’t be bothered for something so simple, they might not be good fits anyways.

      •  domsch   ( @domsch@lemmy.world ) 
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        undefined>It’s more complicated than signing up for Reddit, but really just by 1 degree.

        I don’t know. There are fundamental differences that make lemmy a lot harder to get into. Start by choosing an instance. Add to that, that this decision is pretty much final. No moving accounts ever. Then you get into the fragmentation of communities. is the lemmy.ml, lemmy.world or some other community the “main” one? The base benefits of decentralization are also it’s main issues at the moment. Lemmy needs to get something in place to move accounts cross instance including linking posts and subscriptions. Additionally, Communities need to be able to span multiple instances for various reasons. Mostly to gather people in one place, but also to spread the load. And not the least to also decentralize data. While lemmy as a whole might be decentralized, a community sits on one instance. And once the owner doesn’t want to run it anymore, everything is gone.

    • There have been some privacy concerns regarding Lenny’s implementation (deleted posts and whatnot). Which has kept some users second-guessing the change. I have tried aether before coming here, but sadly, there are not enough people there.

      I just hope that the community from Reddit doesn’t spread itself out too much :(

    •  myk   ( @myk@beehaw.org ) 
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      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.

    • I’m sceptical. If most subs only protest for 2 days, then all Reddit has to do is weather the storm and then continue on. The only way I see it having any further impact is if many large subs black out indefinitely.

      Reddit would either be forced to make concessions or escalate even further by removing the mods of the protesting subs and forcing it open again. That would be a further sign of bad faith and really piss off all these mods that spent up to a decade doing moderation for free.

      • You make it sound like Reddit does not have the option to turn the subreddit on and replace the mods. However, the users who actually really do care about reddit will leave and will have to take their content with them.

      • My hope is that a lot of the more annoyed subs will do the two days and then continue indefinitely after.

        Saying it’s only two days makes it harder for Reddit to prepare some bad-faith counter to it (like replacing the mods and/or putting the sub back to being live).

        A lot of redditors still have no idea what’s going on, so even the two days gives them a chance to get caught up so they can decide if they care about it or not.