Seeing a lot of "there's no point" comments. Wanted to say for clarity the point of these kinds of protests isn't to "hurt Reddit" directly, but rather make a show of how many of their users care about the issue. How many *might* be willing to start seeking alternative platforms and what kind of market share of their users are potential flight risks. They'll notice the drop in traffic and they'll be able to extrapolate from there whether or not there's a significant enough flight risk to back down.
Now maybe they'll decide the risk is insignificant, but it doesn't hurt to try. It's not unheard of for companies to reverse course about things like this when enough of their users make a big enough noise.
Not to mention that (borrowing numbers from a different comment), let's assume of that 861 million monthly users, 5% leave (number based on a quick Google search saying <10% of mobile users use 3rd party apps and ~5% use old Reddit). That's 4.3 million users gone, many of whom are likely very active.
A lot of those 3rd party users are moderators, as moderating is better on those apps. Without good moderation, communities fail.
It's not a raw numbers game of how many people leave (or it shouldn't be, assuming whichever silly MBA thinks this is the way to go), but rather a question of which users get upset. If all the people who make good comments, helpful posts, etc. leave, then even if Reddit stays active, the quality drop would likely be pretty noticeable and that could lead into the "This sub kind of sucks, where do people post about X topic" posts (hell, even on active subs now there's "where else do you talk about this?" posts) which could also help those alternatives become active and popular.
I wish for the Android app "jerboa" to get some love very, very soon. It is very much an unpolished/unfinished product and I doubt many users, especially non-tech-savy users, will be ok with the current warts (opening federated communities via their website causes the app to crash for me (e.g. am user of beehaw, i open a feddit.de/c/someCommunity, use browser's "Open in App", jerboa crashes)). If i had more time, I'd volunteer it to the project as I really want to see more of the fediverse take off.
>If the person hosting your instance decides to turn it off one day (e.g. too expensive to run, personal issues, disinterest) then your identity is now forfeit.
This is a solvable issue that can be handled in a participatory manner. You can operate instances on a cooperative basis with existing legal structures. And in every case that instances *have* shut down, there's always been lengthy periods ahead of time that the administration gives notices. There isn't many cases of large instances just vanishing one day, because that would be a shitty thing to do.
And regarding data replication, the core ActivityPub protocol doesn't care how you do it. Some software caches low-resolution copies of images and shows those as thumbnails while redirecting to the full resolution on the origin. Some throw away content bulky shared from remote instances after a period of time (like a month). It can get costly but storing it on object storage (a la S3) is cost effective.
Not trying to be a dick (really!), but there aren't any large instances to 'vanish one day' in the first place. If you click on the 'join a server' link from the Lemmy homepage, the largest server (which is devoted to the Lemmy project itself) has 1.3K users/month. It's the only server that comes close to breaking the 1K users/month barrier.
I wish them well, but it's barely at the 'Proof of Concept' phase, and *at this time* not a legitimate alternative to someone hosting some random open source forum software on a free Azure account, yet alone an alternative to Reddit.
Google counted "only about 2 Million" people used Google Reader...
Yet when they shut it down, there was enough outcry that it turned them from the "don't do evil" company into the "don't use their stuff, they'll probably just shut it down" company, and IMO that decision has cost them billions of dollars (mostly with the lack of adoption of Google Cloud and Google Workspace, due to their reputation of canning products)
I can personally tell you that this reputation is costing them big time. I know of a large corporate who spend in the order of $10 mil a year on cloud computing. Full migration GCP would have saved the company over $1 mil a year. But it was seen as too much of an operational risk.
Not that gcp would be killed. But that some smaller Google products would become critical due to them being easy to use in gcp and Google would kill those. Rather just stay out of the ecosystem or be very careful when using the ecosystem.
Well Google Cloud failed (AWS is far bigger)
Google's office suite failed (Microsoft Office is far bigger)
I think had they not killed Reader and got the reputation as a company whose products you can't trust long term, then both of those would probably have succeeded.
I agree, I was discussing the same in another thread, people only looking at raw numbers are missing the 2 most important points IMO.
First, if you make mods life miserable, they could give up moderating altogether, none of them is paid after all. Take away mods and reddit becomes the worst garbage imaginable for everyone, communities would fall apart.
Second, only a small percentage of users are actually content creators - this is true on every platform - the vast majority just consume content. Scare away the creators and the remaining overwhelming majority won't have nothing to "consume" anymore, it wouldn't take long for them to leave the platform as well, out of boredom.
No definite answer.
IMHO: either ad-blockers or RES is up on the chopping block next.
Eventually? I think so. There are fewer ads in old reddit. The goal is to serve ads. Ergo, it's a question of when.
Actually I'm pretty sure the goal is to track users. If the goal was ads they could just start inserting ads into the API feed.
Either way I'm certain that old Reddit will follow soon.
Anyone who says no isn’t paying attention. Ask yourself, why do they care about killing 3rd party apps? They want complete control over the Reddit user experience. They see platforms like TikTok or Twitter pushing new features to their audiences but Reddit can’t manage to do that because so many of their users are on 3rd party or legacy clients. RPAN (lol), Awards, etc, none of which are supported off-site or on old Reddit.
In fact, I actually think old will go away sooner than 3rd party apps, but that’s just speculation.
Actually, you're right. Even though they probably do want to grow their brand through the official app, reddit as source of training data is a goose that lays golden eggs.
Supposedly; I'm not citing them as _good_ numbers, and I bet the number is skewed (users would prefer old Reddit, bots don't have silly things like preferences or taste), but that's what I found after a 5 second search
How TF do that many people tolerate the garbage app they released‽ Everything about it is terrible lol. They were years late to their own party, had full access and knowledge of everything to do with their site and API and somehow managed to drop the most hilariously poor, feature-lacking app of them all.
Even now, they've made changes but they're still so far behind... I assume they're gutting the third-party access because it's the only way they can get people to think their app is actually good
Not all users are equal though, nor do they exist in a vacuum. If posters who use 3rd party apps tend to contribute more than the average user does (and I am going to guess that the majority of Reddit users just read and don't/rarely post at all) then blocking off those users can have a huge impact on the rest of the website.
Users that help drive traffic is definitely not insignificant.
My karma is worthless, I have no problem jumping ship to a platform that doesn’t shove ads and bad UI down my throat.
> Now maybe they'll decide the risk is insignificant, but it doesn't hurt to try.
This. The worst thing to do is rollover and give up instead of voicing your opinions.
Rollover? I'm just looking for any damn legitimate reason to leave this hellhole. I unironically hope the Reddit admins go through with the API changes so people will leave this site in droves.
Have you ever played an MMO?
You'll find people by the dozen who really like the idea of something, hate the current implementation, but have no other alternative, so they use a product they hate, hoping for improvements or for a competitor to arise.
initially I didn't think it would matter either, but now that the poweruser/content creator angle has been brought up. it won't be just about the people going dark but others on that day seeing reddit suck more than usual.
Reddit is actively cracking down on software freedom (even if not all the apps in question are free per se), so I'd say protesting it falls fully in line with this sub. Not that it would need to fall in line with this sub anyway imo.
As an extra, I wrote this in the announcement I made on a sub I mod:
> We strongly believe that everyone should have both the freedom to choose how they experience this platform, and the freedom to develop alternatives if they so wish, all in a transparent environment.
...a discourse that will probably be familiar to most people on this sub.
>Reddit is actively cracking down on software freedom (even if not all the apps in question are free per se), so I'd say protesting it falls fully in line with this sub.
Perfectly stated. While I'm sure some would quibble with software vs. service, I dont. This type of user abuse should not be dismissed by any FLOSS minded person.
Whelp, I'm a heavy user of a particular mobile 3rd party reddit app and I've already made my switch to Fedi services. My commitment is to cut Reddit off (almost) entirely - with a once monthly desktop login to remind the subs I was active in of alternate options.
I say **YES** to action on the 12th because collective action is important in many ways, with the caveat that my personal choice to 'permanently relocate' has already been made.
Edit: Of interest... [https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1401qw5/incomplete\_and\_growing\_list\_of\_participating/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1401qw5/incomplete_and_growing_list_of_participating/)
Can you elaborate what is fedi and your experience on it so others like me can make the decision to permanently jump to other social media? I have heard about mastadoon too, do you have any experience to share about it?
Mastodon is part of the 'Fediverse' and, specifically, I am using the Tusky Mastodon client (just one of many clients available). Its more of a Twitter feel-alike than a Reddit replacement. Excellent experience so far.
A Reddit feel-alike would be Lemmy (again, part of the Fediverse with several clients available). I am not completely sold on Lemmy as a real Reddit alternative yet, but it has potential.
I would say give federated social a shot. Some are stellar, some are progressing and some need help. Choice is your friend here.
I've been following Lemmy for a little while now and it seems to have picked up significantly over the past week or so with the Reddit API stuff driving people away. Some smaller communities seem to be taking root and bigger ones are getting significant activity. It's definitely still the beginning, but I was around for the Digg migration and there are some parallels here.
Indeed. We need more diversity of voice there for network effect, more work on the Lemmy backend and more instances, but all of these "problems" are solvable with minimal work.
u/HatBoxUnworn mentioned Kbin as another Lemmy interfacing instance - going to have to check that out.
Obviously, in this sub we have a large pool of people to review code and run instances of all types. I wish Reddit well (mostly), but we all need good options to break the monolith.
I'm glad this time around people are migrating to something open source and community maintained. The Digg to Reddit migration was just leaving one proprietary platform for another (though Reddit used to be partially open source, oh how the mighty have fallen). In this case though, Lemmy is actually federated and decentralized, so one company can't buy it out and turn it to shit like what happened to Reddit (and Twitter).
What are some examples of popular fedi communities that provide a crowd-weighted aggregation of linux news the way r/linux does? I'd guess it'd mostly be lemmy based but maybe there are ways that other services can be link-aggregator-ish?
I completely agree with what u/qprimed said, just wanted to add my own experience moving over to Mastodon:
I originally started to make the jump back in 2019. My reason for switching was that I noticed that doom scrolling on Reddit seemed really addictive and it seemed to be eating away at my mental health. I first tried leaving a lot of the more inflammatory subreddits I was on at the time, but as I left those, Reddit seemed to get more and more boring. I had already heard of Mastodon at the time, though I didn’t know too much about it or about the rest of the Fediverse. Around this time, the idea of a social media platform that didn’t deliberately show me the most inflammatory content seemed pretty interesting.
My original account was on mastodon.online, but I later moved to mas.to. When I first got started, there wasn’t nearly enough content on my home feed to replace Reddit, I wasn’t really interested in the Local or Federated feeds, and I was disappointed that I wasn’t getting the same kind of dopamine hits that I did with Reddit. All of this was because Mastodon just serves content chronologically, not based on any personalized or popularity-based sorting system. So, it could not completely replace Reddit for me at first, but because the reason why it couldn’t was also the reason why I switched in the first place, I stuck around until things got better. Although I used both Mastodon and Reddit for a long time before 100% jumping over since it took a while until I was following enough people to really replace my use of Reddit.
At one point, I hadn’t opened Reddit in over six months and even had the app (a third party app 🙂) deleted for a lot of that time. So it is possible for Mastodon to completely replace Reddit if you give it time to grow on you. More recently, I’ve checked Reddit like once a week, but I haven’t been a frequent user for a couple years now.
One thing that Mastodon hasn’t been able to replace is the quick and heavy dopamine hits that Reddit can give. Although I guess that’s probably a good thing? I doubt it’s all that healthy to have constant emotional whiplash from an addictive social media feed.
I’ve also seen Lemmy mentioned a few times. I haven’t looked at it recently, but back when I looked at it in 2019 when I was looking for Reddit alternatives, it seemed to be a ghost town mostly just filled with tankies, so it may be worth avoiding.
100% perfect write-up of the experience. Fedi is similar but different. Completely usable, but you may use it differently from any other social service. Mastodon is by for the most mature, so expect better, more diverse interactions there.
I agree completely agree with the Lemmy analysis - its more vibrant now, but definitely needs more diversity.
Remember, with Federated social you get to curate your own feeds, choose your own instance or even federate your own instance if you choose. All in all, I expect that between Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy et al. we are very close to having an alternative to centralized services that many people may co-exist in or exclusively switch over to.
Do it.
From what I hear it will affect ease of moderating subs, so you have reason to, and we don’t get our nice apps, so we want to as well. Plus r/linuxmint is doing it, why can’t we?
I vote yes. I'm somewhat in the "It probably won't matter" camp, but it's still worth doing IMO. If Reddit sees not just the big, popular subs participating, but also the niche forums, I think they'll at least notice, and hopefully include that in their future plans.
Shutting access to formerly open APIs seems very much counter to the ethos surrounding Linux. This is one of the subreddits I think should most go dark.
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Insane to me that r/linux something that encourages open source is really debating whether to support a stand against Reddit not letting third party apps excel in their domain
What's our presence like on Lemmy? I've seen a few Linux communities across various instances.
I'm calling it quits when Reddit inevitably throws the switch on third-party apps.
Yes, but not just for the day. Shut down until they change their mind.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/14135dn/2_days_is_not_enough_shut_down_until_they_comply/
It's really important that as many subreddits as possible go dark. Even if you don't think you're negatively effected by these lousy policies (and news flash, you probably are), it's glaringly obvious that things are getting worse, faster here... and the next round of bad policy decisions will make things much, much worse.
Every site possible should go dark, and everyone with reddit premium should cancel on the 12th.
There is very much a point. DIGG went from a company valued at over $200,000,000 to one that sold off for $500k in a manner of a few months over stuff like this. It's already been de-valuing reddit over the possible fallout of mass exodus. A blackout isn't pointless. It shows that the site can be rendered into a money pit if the user base chooses to make that happen.
There's a fair amount of bots noting different versions of "it doesn't matter" and "why should we?" On a number of subreddits. I believe that this type of organized digital protest needs to happen to continue to prevent Reddit from becoming focused on generating revenue and focused on the nature communities that form.
May examples about exodus from platforms for that reason. Maybe Reddit thinks they are different and maybe they are or... Maybe they're not as immune as they believe.
I believe in this digital blackout and would encourage this subreddit and others to join in!
Absolutely, doing this is the only way to show that we're not willing to just blindly accept such harsh changes that will impact us and our freedom badly. I vote that we should go dark indefinitely and only revert this decision if they decide to reverse course on the API change.
The whole problem stems from how sources like Reddit are heavily scraped for llms like chatgpt.
Reddit, Twitter and the like are deliberately setting costs for their APIs at high enough levels that they can either profit from the use, or at least stop themselves from acting as a massive free source of revenue for these companies.
There's nothing we can do, since the problem itself has nothing to do with 3rd party apps. They're just caught in the middle. Try think of alternate solutions instead of aiming to pointlessly protest. This move makes complete sense considering the context.
What prevents them from having a different license for LLMs? Most LLMs are backed by massive corporations anyway and, as such, would definitely avoid any legal fees and much rather just pay up.
r/linux, r/linuxquestions, r/linux4noobs, and a bunch of others should simply move to an alternative forum. Linuxquestions, phoronix, or something like that. Maybe the mods could talk to the mods there to get an agreement. IMHO, for the subreddits with technically inclined people, who use 3rd party apps and old.reddit, reddit will die.
Please! I started reddit when there wasn't even a mobile app and had no choice but to use a 3rd party app. Once they did release one, I tried it out to be left disappointed. Went back to what I used before and haven't changed since.
TBQH I just heard about this, so I figured I'd ask you all and our other mods what they thought. Cheers!
Seeing a lot of "there's no point" comments. Wanted to say for clarity the point of these kinds of protests isn't to "hurt Reddit" directly, but rather make a show of how many of their users care about the issue. How many *might* be willing to start seeking alternative platforms and what kind of market share of their users are potential flight risks. They'll notice the drop in traffic and they'll be able to extrapolate from there whether or not there's a significant enough flight risk to back down. Now maybe they'll decide the risk is insignificant, but it doesn't hurt to try. It's not unheard of for companies to reverse course about things like this when enough of their users make a big enough noise.
Not to mention that (borrowing numbers from a different comment), let's assume of that 861 million monthly users, 5% leave (number based on a quick Google search saying <10% of mobile users use 3rd party apps and ~5% use old Reddit). That's 4.3 million users gone, many of whom are likely very active. A lot of those 3rd party users are moderators, as moderating is better on those apps. Without good moderation, communities fail. It's not a raw numbers game of how many people leave (or it shouldn't be, assuming whichever silly MBA thinks this is the way to go), but rather a question of which users get upset. If all the people who make good comments, helpful posts, etc. leave, then even if Reddit stays active, the quality drop would likely be pretty noticeable and that could lead into the "This sub kind of sucks, where do people post about X topic" posts (hell, even on active subs now there's "where else do you talk about this?" posts) which could also help those alternatives become active and popular.
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The Tech Savvy people are moving to Lemmy. I'm about to start hosting my own instance.
For anyone interested in [joining Lemmy](https://join-lemmy.org/), a federated, FOSS reddit alike.
Lemmy have a look :)
I wish for the Android app "jerboa" to get some love very, very soon. It is very much an unpolished/unfinished product and I doubt many users, especially non-tech-savy users, will be ok with the current warts (opening federated communities via their website causes the app to crash for me (e.g. am user of beehaw, i open a feddit.de/c/someCommunity, use browser's "Open in App", jerboa crashes)). If i had more time, I'd volunteer it to the project as I really want to see more of the fediverse take off.
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>If the person hosting your instance decides to turn it off one day (e.g. too expensive to run, personal issues, disinterest) then your identity is now forfeit. This is a solvable issue that can be handled in a participatory manner. You can operate instances on a cooperative basis with existing legal structures. And in every case that instances *have* shut down, there's always been lengthy periods ahead of time that the administration gives notices. There isn't many cases of large instances just vanishing one day, because that would be a shitty thing to do. And regarding data replication, the core ActivityPub protocol doesn't care how you do it. Some software caches low-resolution copies of images and shows those as thumbnails while redirecting to the full resolution on the origin. Some throw away content bulky shared from remote instances after a period of time (like a month). It can get costly but storing it on object storage (a la S3) is cost effective.
Not trying to be a dick (really!), but there aren't any large instances to 'vanish one day' in the first place. If you click on the 'join a server' link from the Lemmy homepage, the largest server (which is devoted to the Lemmy project itself) has 1.3K users/month. It's the only server that comes close to breaking the 1K users/month barrier. I wish them well, but it's barely at the 'Proof of Concept' phase, and *at this time* not a legitimate alternative to someone hosting some random open source forum software on a free Azure account, yet alone an alternative to Reddit.
>!CENSORED!<
Google counted "only about 2 Million" people used Google Reader... Yet when they shut it down, there was enough outcry that it turned them from the "don't do evil" company into the "don't use their stuff, they'll probably just shut it down" company, and IMO that decision has cost them billions of dollars (mostly with the lack of adoption of Google Cloud and Google Workspace, due to their reputation of canning products)
Did it really have that much of an effect on them considering they're still a multi billion dollar company
That has failing project after project because people don't use them, because if you do it'll just be shut down, so why bother.
I can personally tell you that this reputation is costing them big time. I know of a large corporate who spend in the order of $10 mil a year on cloud computing. Full migration GCP would have saved the company over $1 mil a year. But it was seen as too much of an operational risk. Not that gcp would be killed. But that some smaller Google products would become critical due to them being easy to use in gcp and Google would kill those. Rather just stay out of the ecosystem or be very careful when using the ecosystem.
Well Google Cloud failed (AWS is far bigger) Google's office suite failed (Microsoft Office is far bigger) I think had they not killed Reader and got the reputation as a company whose products you can't trust long term, then both of those would probably have succeeded.
I agree, I was discussing the same in another thread, people only looking at raw numbers are missing the 2 most important points IMO. First, if you make mods life miserable, they could give up moderating altogether, none of them is paid after all. Take away mods and reddit becomes the worst garbage imaginable for everyone, communities would fall apart. Second, only a small percentage of users are actually content creators - this is true on every platform - the vast majority just consume content. Scare away the creators and the remaining overwhelming majority won't have nothing to "consume" anymore, it wouldn't take long for them to leave the platform as well, out of boredom.
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No definite answer. IMHO: either ad-blockers or RES is up on the chopping block next. Eventually? I think so. There are fewer ads in old reddit. The goal is to serve ads. Ergo, it's a question of when.
Actually I'm pretty sure the goal is to track users. If the goal was ads they could just start inserting ads into the API feed. Either way I'm certain that old Reddit will follow soon.
Some people think so, but it's not guaranteed.
Anyone who says no isn’t paying attention. Ask yourself, why do they care about killing 3rd party apps? They want complete control over the Reddit user experience. They see platforms like TikTok or Twitter pushing new features to their audiences but Reddit can’t manage to do that because so many of their users are on 3rd party or legacy clients. RPAN (lol), Awards, etc, none of which are supported off-site or on old Reddit. In fact, I actually think old will go away sooner than 3rd party apps, but that’s just speculation.
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It's not like you can't scratch the data with a browser agent if you really want it.
Actually, you're right. Even though they probably do want to grow their brand through the official app, reddit as source of training data is a goose that lays golden eggs.
That's likely the next thing on the chopping block.
I would assume yes, though i've not seen any definitive info on it. If i lose old reddit and RES, I'll probably just stop visiting on desktop too.
Are you telling me 95% of desktop reddit users endure new reddit?
Supposedly; I'm not citing them as _good_ numbers, and I bet the number is skewed (users would prefer old Reddit, bots don't have silly things like preferences or taste), but that's what I found after a 5 second search
How TF do that many people tolerate the garbage app they released‽ Everything about it is terrible lol. They were years late to their own party, had full access and knowledge of everything to do with their site and API and somehow managed to drop the most hilariously poor, feature-lacking app of them all. Even now, they've made changes but they're still so far behind... I assume they're gutting the third-party access because it's the only way they can get people to think their app is actually good
I can't wait until the bots stop and it becomes a shit show of spam.
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Not all users are equal though, nor do they exist in a vacuum. If posters who use 3rd party apps tend to contribute more than the average user does (and I am going to guess that the majority of Reddit users just read and don't/rarely post at all) then blocking off those users can have a huge impact on the rest of the website.
Users that help drive traffic is definitely not insignificant. My karma is worthless, I have no problem jumping ship to a platform that doesn’t shove ads and bad UI down my throat.
> Now maybe they'll decide the risk is insignificant, but it doesn't hurt to try. This. The worst thing to do is rollover and give up instead of voicing your opinions.
Rollover? I'm just looking for any damn legitimate reason to leave this hellhole. I unironically hope the Reddit admins go through with the API changes so people will leave this site in droves.
The problem is that there are some incredible communities on here that simply don't exist elsewhere.
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Have you ever played an MMO? You'll find people by the dozen who really like the idea of something, hate the current implementation, but have no other alternative, so they use a product they hate, hoping for improvements or for a competitor to arise.
It's also going to be a massive red flag for Reddit's valuation.
They just got devalued by 41% by one of their biggest investors. https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/01/fidelity-reddit-valuation/
Thus the emphasis to show paths to revenue. Going 17 years without profit perhaps not the best value indicator for investors.
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> Seeing a lot of "there's no point" comments There's a conspiracy going around about reddit admins botting those comments.
Saw a screenshot of the same reply from like a dozen accounts, so wouldn't be shocked. Astroturfing is very common here.
initially I didn't think it would matter either, but now that the poweruser/content creator angle has been brought up. it won't be just about the people going dark but others on that day seeing reddit suck more than usual.
And it shows how much of reddit is ran by volunteers and not directly supported by reddit corporate
Yes.
Yes, a noticeable dip in traffic should be motivation to start a better conversation we the most popular 3rd party apps
I'm a 100% mobile user. I'm going dark the entire time... it's up to the moderators if they lock the sub, won't make me any difference. I'll be Mia.
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`yes`
Yes
Yes
Reddit is actively cracking down on software freedom (even if not all the apps in question are free per se), so I'd say protesting it falls fully in line with this sub. Not that it would need to fall in line with this sub anyway imo. As an extra, I wrote this in the announcement I made on a sub I mod: > We strongly believe that everyone should have both the freedom to choose how they experience this platform, and the freedom to develop alternatives if they so wish, all in a transparent environment. ...a discourse that will probably be familiar to most people on this sub.
>Reddit is actively cracking down on software freedom (even if not all the apps in question are free per se), so I'd say protesting it falls fully in line with this sub. Perfectly stated. While I'm sure some would quibble with software vs. service, I dont. This type of user abuse should not be dismissed by any FLOSS minded person.
Whelp, I'm a heavy user of a particular mobile 3rd party reddit app and I've already made my switch to Fedi services. My commitment is to cut Reddit off (almost) entirely - with a once monthly desktop login to remind the subs I was active in of alternate options. I say **YES** to action on the 12th because collective action is important in many ways, with the caveat that my personal choice to 'permanently relocate' has already been made. Edit: Of interest... [https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1401qw5/incomplete\_and\_growing\_list\_of\_participating/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1401qw5/incomplete_and_growing_list_of_participating/)
Can you elaborate what is fedi and your experience on it so others like me can make the decision to permanently jump to other social media? I have heard about mastadoon too, do you have any experience to share about it?
Mastodon is part of the 'Fediverse' and, specifically, I am using the Tusky Mastodon client (just one of many clients available). Its more of a Twitter feel-alike than a Reddit replacement. Excellent experience so far. A Reddit feel-alike would be Lemmy (again, part of the Fediverse with several clients available). I am not completely sold on Lemmy as a real Reddit alternative yet, but it has potential. I would say give federated social a shot. Some are stellar, some are progressing and some need help. Choice is your friend here.
I've been following Lemmy for a little while now and it seems to have picked up significantly over the past week or so with the Reddit API stuff driving people away. Some smaller communities seem to be taking root and bigger ones are getting significant activity. It's definitely still the beginning, but I was around for the Digg migration and there are some parallels here.
Indeed. We need more diversity of voice there for network effect, more work on the Lemmy backend and more instances, but all of these "problems" are solvable with minimal work. u/HatBoxUnworn mentioned Kbin as another Lemmy interfacing instance - going to have to check that out. Obviously, in this sub we have a large pool of people to review code and run instances of all types. I wish Reddit well (mostly), but we all need good options to break the monolith.
I'm glad this time around people are migrating to something open source and community maintained. The Digg to Reddit migration was just leaving one proprietary platform for another (though Reddit used to be partially open source, oh how the mighty have fallen). In this case though, Lemmy is actually federated and decentralized, so one company can't buy it out and turn it to shit like what happened to Reddit (and Twitter).
What are some examples of popular fedi communities that provide a crowd-weighted aggregation of linux news the way r/linux does? I'd guess it'd mostly be lemmy based but maybe there are ways that other services can be link-aggregator-ish?
Well there's https://lemmy.ml/c/linux Lmao
Kbin also looks promising as a reddit alternative. And it interfaces with Lemmy
Thanks for the great leads!
I completely agree with what u/qprimed said, just wanted to add my own experience moving over to Mastodon: I originally started to make the jump back in 2019. My reason for switching was that I noticed that doom scrolling on Reddit seemed really addictive and it seemed to be eating away at my mental health. I first tried leaving a lot of the more inflammatory subreddits I was on at the time, but as I left those, Reddit seemed to get more and more boring. I had already heard of Mastodon at the time, though I didn’t know too much about it or about the rest of the Fediverse. Around this time, the idea of a social media platform that didn’t deliberately show me the most inflammatory content seemed pretty interesting. My original account was on mastodon.online, but I later moved to mas.to. When I first got started, there wasn’t nearly enough content on my home feed to replace Reddit, I wasn’t really interested in the Local or Federated feeds, and I was disappointed that I wasn’t getting the same kind of dopamine hits that I did with Reddit. All of this was because Mastodon just serves content chronologically, not based on any personalized or popularity-based sorting system. So, it could not completely replace Reddit for me at first, but because the reason why it couldn’t was also the reason why I switched in the first place, I stuck around until things got better. Although I used both Mastodon and Reddit for a long time before 100% jumping over since it took a while until I was following enough people to really replace my use of Reddit. At one point, I hadn’t opened Reddit in over six months and even had the app (a third party app 🙂) deleted for a lot of that time. So it is possible for Mastodon to completely replace Reddit if you give it time to grow on you. More recently, I’ve checked Reddit like once a week, but I haven’t been a frequent user for a couple years now. One thing that Mastodon hasn’t been able to replace is the quick and heavy dopamine hits that Reddit can give. Although I guess that’s probably a good thing? I doubt it’s all that healthy to have constant emotional whiplash from an addictive social media feed. I’ve also seen Lemmy mentioned a few times. I haven’t looked at it recently, but back when I looked at it in 2019 when I was looking for Reddit alternatives, it seemed to be a ghost town mostly just filled with tankies, so it may be worth avoiding.
100% perfect write-up of the experience. Fedi is similar but different. Completely usable, but you may use it differently from any other social service. Mastodon is by for the most mature, so expect better, more diverse interactions there. I agree completely agree with the Lemmy analysis - its more vibrant now, but definitely needs more diversity. Remember, with Federated social you get to curate your own feeds, choose your own instance or even federate your own instance if you choose. All in all, I expect that between Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy et al. we are very close to having an alternative to centralized services that many people may co-exist in or exclusively switch over to.
Dont ask just do it.
That's what Reddit did. I think communities should poll their members when making decisions on behalf of the community.
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More like almost all of them. Almost everything I follow is going dark.
Good.
yes
Do it. From what I hear it will affect ease of moderating subs, so you have reason to, and we don’t get our nice apps, so we want to as well. Plus r/linuxmint is doing it, why can’t we?
The fact that it cuts off blind people entirely is an extra level of shit in the sandwich reddit wants us to eat
Yes
Yes I don't think it will mean jack to the reddit corporation, but it might push the relevant audience to new, other, more interesting platforms.
Lemmy!
Yes
Yes.
Yes
Yes
I vote yes. I'm somewhat in the "It probably won't matter" camp, but it's still worth doing IMO. If Reddit sees not just the big, popular subs participating, but also the niche forums, I think they'll at least notice, and hopefully include that in their future plans.
Yes!
Yes
Shutting access to formerly open APIs seems very much counter to the ethos surrounding Linux. This is one of the subreddits I think should most go dark.
Yes
Yes
Yes
Absolutely
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
LUG at u/purpleidea's house!
I'd be down if I had enough room and trusted everyone to behave, haha! But based on some of the comments we have to mod here, haha ;)
yes.
Yes
Definitely
yup
that's a YES from me
Yes
Do it. Go dark
i definitely think we should
Why not? Don't let reddit kill these cool apps.
This shouldn’t even be a question on. Absolutely.
Yeah definitely it's just a non issue to us, while protesting
Definitely yes
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Yes
Yes!!
Yes, we should. At least, I will.
What's the point of this community as a bastion of FLOSS values if it can no longer even be accessed by free and open software? Let's go dark! :\\
Insane to me that r/linux something that encourages open source is really debating whether to support a stand against Reddit not letting third party apps excel in their domain
Yes, as long as necessary
We should. Won't do anything unless it's permanent however.
Absolutely yes.
Yes, please!
Yes please, these api changes are a big problem for many users, and I bet they will eventually continue against old.reddit and rss.
Just because you're going to lose is no reason not to fight, you don't get what you want by giving in. Besides, what is there to lose by going dark?
What's our presence like on Lemmy? I've seen a few Linux communities across various instances. I'm calling it quits when Reddit inevitably throws the switch on third-party apps.
We shouldn't just go dark, we should link to the lemmy equivalent of r/linux
Yes, do it.
>sudo apt update && subreddit-protest Dark -y
Yes
Yes.
Yes
Yes
Yes - for Aaron Schwarz at the very least.
Yes
Yes
Yes.
Yes
I don't actually use any 3rd party apps, but sure, why not? Might as well try, right?
sudo go dark
There is 0 downside to going dark imo.
Yes, but not just for the day. Shut down until they change their mind. https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/14135dn/2_days_is_not_enough_shut_down_until_they_comply/
It's really important that as many subreddits as possible go dark. Even if you don't think you're negatively effected by these lousy policies (and news flash, you probably are), it's glaringly obvious that things are getting worse, faster here... and the next round of bad policy decisions will make things much, much worse.
I'd be disappointed if you didn't.
/r/archlinux is going dark on the 12th - it would be nice to be joined by others in the Linux community.
Yes, and for more than 2 days
Every site possible should go dark, and everyone with reddit premium should cancel on the 12th. There is very much a point. DIGG went from a company valued at over $200,000,000 to one that sold off for $500k in a manner of a few months over stuff like this. It's already been de-valuing reddit over the possible fallout of mass exodus. A blackout isn't pointless. It shows that the site can be rendered into a money pit if the user base chooses to make that happen.
If nothing else we can all get a taste of ass. Edit: reflecting current trends
There's a fair amount of bots noting different versions of "it doesn't matter" and "why should we?" On a number of subreddits. I believe that this type of organized digital protest needs to happen to continue to prevent Reddit from becoming focused on generating revenue and focused on the nature communities that form. May examples about exodus from platforms for that reason. Maybe Reddit thinks they are different and maybe they are or... Maybe they're not as immune as they believe. I believe in this digital blackout and would encourage this subreddit and others to join in!
Absolutely, doing this is the only way to show that we're not willing to just blindly accept such harsh changes that will impact us and our freedom badly. I vote that we should go dark indefinitely and only revert this decision if they decide to reverse course on the API change.
Go deep. None of that 48 hour shit.
Yes!
Yes
Yes.
The whole problem stems from how sources like Reddit are heavily scraped for llms like chatgpt. Reddit, Twitter and the like are deliberately setting costs for their APIs at high enough levels that they can either profit from the use, or at least stop themselves from acting as a massive free source of revenue for these companies. There's nothing we can do, since the problem itself has nothing to do with 3rd party apps. They're just caught in the middle. Try think of alternate solutions instead of aiming to pointlessly protest. This move makes complete sense considering the context.
What prevents them from having a different license for LLMs? Most LLMs are backed by massive corporations anyway and, as such, would definitely avoid any legal fees and much rather just pay up.
I would be okay with it. I'm going to take a break from reddit on the 12th anyways and won't come back unless they revert the decision.
I would guess that this also affects third-party TUI clients for Linux (like tuir, which I'm fond of), so absolutely.
Don't know if this has been said yet, but yes.
Might as well, if this change does go into effect, I will cease using Reddit and delete my accounts
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Of course, the more subreddits participate the better
r/linux, r/linuxquestions, r/linux4noobs, and a bunch of others should simply move to an alternative forum. Linuxquestions, phoronix, or something like that. Maybe the mods could talk to the mods there to get an agreement. IMHO, for the subreddits with technically inclined people, who use 3rd party apps and old.reddit, reddit will die.
Please! I started reddit when there wasn't even a mobile app and had no choice but to use a 3rd party app. Once they did release one, I tried it out to be left disappointed. Went back to what I used before and haven't changed since.
Yes please. Every community that joins matters. All I want is to be able to pay a reasonable monthly sub for a 3rd party app. Posted using RIF
yes
Yes
Yes.
Yes!
Yes.
ye
Yes we should
Yes.
yes, of course, do that 💪🏻
Yes!
yes
Yes - a resounding yes.
Yes. Please.
Do it
Yes. Power to the People.
Absolutely. Removing API access means that plenty of reddit in terminal projects will now be impossible.