From the article:
"Moving to the Fediverse
This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge. A social network built on an open protocol can afford some host-agnosticism, and allow communities to persist even if individual hosts fail or start to abuse their power. Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary, as we saw last fall when Twitter cracked down on discussions of its Fediverse-alternative, Mastodon."
How and why did Reddit think copying Twitter’s API pricing mistake was a good idea? And why charge Apollo $20 million?!
Like that’s just a cricket bat to the face.
Part of me thinks they were planning on using the high rate as a negotiation tactic. Ask for twice what you want, then back down to your actual number.
Then the Apollo dev “miscommunication” happened and things got ugly. Maybe they’ll still back down, but maybe they’ll die on that hill.
The other part of me thinks they just want to kill 3p apps and this is the easiest way to do that. Just price them out. They probably had some accountant or MBA crunch numbers on how many people would leave vs how much more revenue driving people to their ad ridden hellscape of an app…and figured it was worth the bad press.
Hell, they probably saw what Netflix just did with account sharing and were like “they got more subscribers!!!”.
I think we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Reddit. It will be slow at first then all at once.
The fediverse is the real Web3
I think it is more like the protoweb. How this works is more similar to BBSes, Usenet, IRC networks and the like from 30 years ago. Truly distributed networks with no central controlling mechanism and the systems communicate by simply agreeing on the technical protocol. That was what the internet was designed for i the first place. The last couple of decades where everything has been centralized to a few big megacorps is an abomination.
Since the fediverse unlike the rest of the web consists mostly of people hostile to aggressive monetisation there’s a built-in limit to how ‘capitalist’ (in the popular sense rather than the technical sense) an instance can be in terms of funding it. Instances will be forced to find alternative ways to pay the bills to the traditional ‘our users are the commodity we sell’ approach of the corporate social media platforms if they want to stick around for the long run which will be a fantastic thing for the web I think.
Capitalism is destroying the internet
Unbridled capitalism is destroying
the interneteverything it touches.When the ONLY motive for doing (or not doing) something is profit, things go to sit sooner or later. The example I often use is that we actually have enough food in the planet to feed everyone. We just throw a large portion of it away or destroy it, because in so many cases food is not made/grown to feed people, but to generate profits… Sad reality of late stage capitalism.
Agreed. A lot of it is due to misplaced or misrepresented priorities. If you don’t account for human and environmental impacts in the proverbial “bottom line”, you’re gonna have a bad time. If we implemented metrics for sustainability and societal improvement as part of the “worth” or “profits” of a company, the world and our future in it may be a little less bleak of a place. Instead, the current system places waaay too much emphasis on short-term goals that are frankly not in line with what I would consider “productivity”.
Just the Internet, huh? I think it’s ruining a few things. Especially when it’s coupled w/ the forever growth mentality.
Infinite growth is the philosophy of cancer
This is the best most comprehensive article written on this subject. And there is a link to every other article. As usual EFF does their homework and applies their judgement to describe perfectly:
The heart of this fight is for what Reddit’s CEO calls their “valuable corpus of data,” i.e. the user-made content on the company’s servers, and for who gets live off this digital commons. While Reddit provides essential infrastructural support, these community developers and moderators make the site worth visiting, and any worthwhile content is the fruit of their volunteer labor. It’s this labor and worker solidarity which gives users unique leverage over the platform, in contrast to past backlash to other platforms.
I’ll soon need to back on some of my optional subscriptions, but the yearly donation to EFF is staying for sure
EFF doesn’t miss. Those guys gals and folks inbetween all rule. Fighting the good fight ✊
Sadly, Reddit has likely won the short-term battle. But hopefully, this Blackout raises awareness of the need for alternatives. Whether it be Lemmy/Kbin, some up-and-coming site like Squabbles or Tildes, or something not yet created, the seeds of migration off Reddit have been planted. If Reddit has such apathy for its communities pre-IPO, just imagine how bad it will be post-IPO when they are dealing with Wallstreet directly.
Yeah a lot of naysayers had me convinced a short protest would do nothing, but you’re right… This is about awareness. I’ve noticed particularly in the last year a downgrade in quality content on reddit and im sure others are noticing. Lemmy might not be ready yet, but it can be with some building inertia and useability improvements.
If they think people will left reddit in droves and reddit will shutdown during the blackout, yeah they are wrong. The blackout is about awareness, and during this short 48 hours, we already discovered swathes upon swathes of reddit alternatives, some are bigger than other, some are livelier than other, all within their communities yet federating each other, far from whateverthefuck spez is doing. And for that, the blackout is successful.
Lemmy or Kbin might be small, but hey, at least we can quite certain that we are human contributors, not bots.
Just to be the devil’s advocate here. What if Reddit joined the fediverse, what’s stopping them from opening their doors to the increasing fediverse users and use their ads-machine on fediverse?
use their ads-machine on fediverse
How would that part work?
Also, if they did join the fediverse, that would significantly reduce user lock-in to their site - which is why they won’t.
Don’t underestimate the power of corporate greed.
This, I did not know:
Details about Reddit’s API-specific costs were not shared, but it is worth noting that an API request is commonly no more burdensome to a server than an HTML request, i.e. visiting or scraping a web page. Having an API just makes it easier for developers to maintain their automated requests.
Yeah, there’s nothing special about an API. It’s just a shortcut for the app to use to get specific info from the server.
Even worse, their official app uses the same API – and, by estimates, the Reddit app uses more calls than Apollo does.
They wanted more per user than they will ever make. A multiple of that, in fact.
Yep. This is Huffman having a tantrum because he found out someone is making enough money to live on with their coding, and his company isn’t getting a slice.
RES is used by some significant percentage of Redditors and they take donations to fund their work. I’m willing to bet they’re next on the chopping block of his tantrum.
Lemmy, Mastodon and Kbin are the future of social media.
@twistedtxb @dirtmayor Completely agree. The fact that people from all over the web using different services can engage is amazing (hello from mastodon!)
This seriously blows my mind. You’re commenting from Mastodon on a Beehaw thread which I’m reading and replying via Fedia.io. All this interconnection is amazing; it truly embodies the concept of an internet.
We should remind people that we have zero qualms about email which is essentially a federated service. You can be on Gmail, Yahoo, or Bing and trust that your message will be delivered to where you point it.
The only difference being that email is pointed to a particular user on a given instance, and here messages are pointed to magazines/communities.
Wait, does Lemmy federate with Mastodon? How does that work?
On mastodon search for the account @news@beehaw.org it will be this lemmy sub but in mastodon. Commenting on posts in mastodon will also comment on the lemmy thread.
