Absolutely, even without all the reddit drama a decentralised version clearly seems to be the smartest way to go. Reddit is it's community and I think the ceo lost sight of that.

Agreed. Everything else on the internet is based on open protocols. (ostensibly) there's no reason social media cant be too

It still looks pretty bad (in a good way): https://reddark.untone.uk/

Almost 7,000 subs private, including many of the biggest ones. This is by no means letting up.

The subs going dark should have only been half of the protest. Users should have also stayed away from the site but I don't think that was really coordinated.

The number of new posts didn't drop much, the comments dropped a bit more but only by like 20%, which isn't a lot given the amount of subs that went dark. Reddit doesn't care about subs, they care about users and it seems engagement was still pretty high.

The next protest should be to all users to stop using the site. Drop the users and they'll start to listen.

Reddit admins are starting to boot mods and force open subs. Total desperation move

I am just waiting on r/askhistorians. Whatever they do next I will follow.

I was really hoping that there would have been more solidarity =|

I deleted RIF on Monday and went to Reddit today via mobile and it was such a pain in the ass as soon as I shut it off I instinctively hit the Jerboa icon (I intentionally put it where RIF was on my homescreen).

Also the Jerboa app is getting better almost daily.

I read that the Sync app was being shut down at the end of the month, then the blackouts started and I just thought Fuck it and set Sync to 0 minutes screen time on my phone while I set up Lemmy. I'm liking it so far just needs more users

Today I logged in on my trash account to see what’s going on. On r/gaming there was a really interesting conversation about the protest. Seems to me that there is no shortage of people who merely see the protest as an inconvenience. Many of them don’t even see any issues with the default reddit app. It’s sad that there are so many people like that.

Well, they seem to like the ad infested reddit, so let them stay there.

Yea the past few days I saw posts about the biggest influx is coming today at the start of the blackout, but I gotta say most people are fine with reddit if they get to use their 3PA. I think when some shut down there might be a bit more people comming opposed to the last few days

Yea I wanna see if any are going to be deleted if its possible. That would be a interesting metric. Because if they arent listening to the black out I think they might start to listen if dubs get permanently deleted and A LOT of their content dissapears

Agreed. I've still been checking Apollo everyday out of habit. Once July 1st hits, Apollo is getting deleted off my phone and then I don't really see myself using Reddit much.

The 90-9-1 rule of internet communities applies though. If you're unfamiliar:

90% of people lurk, 9% interact, and 1% create content. Reddit has an additional 0.1% snuck in there of people who moderate.

If you're in that smaller echelon of users who interact or submit/create content, you're more than likely a user who these api changes affect. So the 90% doesn't really matter in the long run if you have no content, and the content that does come in is poorly moderated or not modded at all.

This kills the reddit.

I don't want to nitpick, but I used the default reddit app and have switched Lemmy based on principal. I don't think most or even many people are like me, but there are a few of us out there that just don't like supporting companies that clearly don't have users interests in mind, and this has been the wakeup call needed to get us off the platform.

I have never used the official Reddit app and never will. Even with Revamped as an AdBlocker the UI is so bad it's not worth it. That's without going into specifics on the principle of the thing.

Two days ago they were, as of his words "not profiting", and suddenly a blackout doesn't affect them? What a clown.

His unethical behavior is why I'd want him out as an investor. His decisions are directly harming Reddit's reputation and damaging the IPO when it happens. The point is to increase value, not damage it. He must really think that the revenue syphoned by third party apps is worth all this.

Can you elaborate a little more? If I were an investor in reddit, my primary concern would be whether the blackout was actually impacting revenue. If the revenue is flat, then the blackout is just noise and things will return to normal soon.

Digg is still around too, after all.

Heck, so are Slashdot, Fark, and Usenet.

Reddit doesn't need to "die" in order for something better to come along.

Tough to disagree, hopefully long term users decide to gtfo before it gets even worse.

To big to fail? No way. To big to not disappear completely? Probably.

50:50 they fail to IPO, investors demand it gets sold in firesale, someone who dgaf picks it up for the seo and no one sticks around.

I saw a comment making the good point that Reddit doesn't have that thing which locks people into other social software - your friends using it, i.e. it doesn't matter that some people will still use Reddit, you go for the content not the people. The Reddit management seem to think that they have something special, ignoring that there will likely be a measurable disappearance of content due to these changes. While this won't "kill" Reddit, in ten years or so when someone's writing a blog post called "what happened to Reddit?", this event will probably be noted as one of those turning points that was the beginning of the end. Reddit will live on, but it won't be the same beast that most of us actually liked using.

Reddit failing doesn't mean they shutdown or go bankrupt, it means they stop being popular and lose what made them a good content. Digg is a good example, it's still there but no one cares about it and it definitely lost what made it good before.

When people talk about Reddit failing it'll probably be something like digg, as opposed to just shutting down.

Nothing to too big to fail. Literally nothing.

People are ADDICTED to Reddit. So much so that they are using Reddit as their primary resource to talk about how much they hate it.

Once the craziness around the API stuff dies down and it's time to stop using Reddit for good, I'm willing to bet nearly all of these people cave in some way.

If people have to download a new app to replace apollo, sync, RIF, etc then they should download Jerboa and sign up to Lemmy. If you're gonna have to get used to a different app interface nows the time!

At the start of all this when Christian first posted I figured I would just use some sort of workaround like old.reddit in mobile browser; the official app and new reddit are non-starters for me, it's just not how I browse.

However, in the days since I have been increasingly dismayed by Spez and the rest of the leadership response, a lack of interest in even engaging on the subject and outright hostility towards a community that has been dedicated to reddit for years. I can't see myself going back there, it's been poisoned for me.

I think a good portion will do both frankly. Half will go elsewhere or reduce usage. Half will stay like nothing happened.

I'm curious about the mod tools. Is it possible to moderate a small to medium sized subreddit without those tools? To me, the mods are the glue behind it all. If a subreddit goes off the rails because of bot spam and toxic/hate posts, people will just go elsewhere.

So if mods stop moderating because they don't have access to their tools, this will likely happen at one point or another.

Reddit has many people who talk about a topic, and it's searchable.

Daily I google/duckduckgo: site:reddit.com [recommendation] and get a discussion of products or software or question, etc.

Lemmy may have some of that, but obviously doesn't have as much because it's ramping. But to make matters worse, searching federated content is more difficult than searching a centralized site.

On the other hand, Reddits internal search is absolute garbage. I think if lemmy works in making an amazing search within the federation, it'll help bridge that gap and give lemmy something reddit doesn't have.

I think most people that use those 3rd party apps will move away to Lemmy, just like I have. I might come across reddit content during random web searches but I likely won't be starting to use the other mobile app on my phone and will certainly not contributed to any sub anymore.

I like the concept of lemmy better. I'm done with reddit admin fuckery. Reddit wants a bigger piece of the pie, and I suppose it is inevitable for a profit motivated company to go in that way. I might be ok if they were innovating for users too, but they are only innovating for investors and their bottom line. Where care for the community is the number one concern as a community member, financialization of the platform seems to be in direct conflict with that. This sort of sacrifice of community interest in favor of financial opportunities will continue to happen too because of Reddit's profit motive. The reddit value proposition outlook is bad as a user, and I'm out because of that.

It may not “end” Reddit but I do think this will end Reddit as we know it. It will just be a shell of itself just like Facebook is no longer a place for college friends to connect and share photos.

This is the gist of it. It will happen again, and again, and again. After they go public, every quarter that they need to come up with some shenanigans to satisfy shareholders, it will happen again. Eventually, either a new thing will come up and start it all over again, or we will be mostly decentralized.

I've also learnt about several awesome subreddits. That made me double mad, knowing all the things I'm just missing.

What's interesting is that people are becoming more aware. For years, Google has been getting messed up as Reddit kind of absorbed the web... and now it's hard to find things outside Reddit.

It's better to build better internet by working outside Reddit - that doesn't mean Reddit isn't good.

During the last site-wide protest in 2015 I set up a VOAT account with all the similar subreddits that I had at the time. When people first started suggesting abandoning ship, I thought "Well, at least I still have Voat". Checks Voat. Turned into a alt-rght haven and then shut down in 2020. Dho!

Fluctuation of user numbers should at least impact the value of their stocks when they go public.

having no longer access to my favorite subs, there's no point to stick with reddit.

Agree. I don't plan to leave Reddit but it's good to look at the alternatives that are available out there.

It’s already changed so much from what it used to be, it’s crazy. I’m definitely dealing with withdrawals just from not being there, it was a powerful habit for me to go and scroll, but I was already enjoying the content there less and less and have been happy for the break. I’ve read two good books since the beginning of the blackout and really can’t see myself installing Reddit on my phone any time soon. The break has been a relief. I like it here a lot more.

Yea, it's gonna be sad watching it slowly morph into something unrecognizable. You could argue it was already doing that these last few years, but with the loss of many old-school redditors change will be faster imo

It's rarely talked about, frustratingly. I didn't find Beehaw through articles or suggestions from people online, which I should've been able to do - I just found it because I have a friend into the fediverse space. Pure luck.

Imo the creators of third party apps should be talking about moving to alternatives (not moving their own apps, if they can't, but just being voices for it).

There is a mention of the tracker though and the tracker has a link to lemmy :D it'll get anyone who's interested in how many sites are down (its not perfect but its something)

It would've been very powerful if there was a remote consensus on where to setup shop during/after the blackouts rather than framing them as a wholly temporary thing. I completely understand that that would've been tough, but imagine if Lemmy/Beehaw/whatever else was mentioned in all of the Subreddit messages about closures.

It also tells you that, depsite all the subs that blacked out, total comments posted dropped by something trivial -- like 10%.

Admittedly, if Lemmy took that 10%, it would be a coup for federated services. But it looks like Lemmy took less than 1% of reddits total traffic during the blackout.

This is a great resource, thank you! Interesting to like that there was an impact over the past 2 days, but it looks like it's going back up to normal today. I guess we need to wait until the end of the month to see what happens with apps shutting down and subs continuing/going back to blackouts. Hopefully this wasn't just a one time, 2-day reduction in traffic.

Wowwww the comments and posts graph is crazy! Hardly a blip!!?

I never realized how many subreddits there were. feel like in all my years I scratched the surface. Well oh well no who cares. Hope reddit falls apart and forums go back to individual. alternatives rule the day

I agree, the Verge’s coverage has been much better on this subject. It isn’t about not paying for use, it’s about a reasonable price that isn’t so exorbitant to essentially bankrupt them and make them go away. Christian has addressed this point several times already.

Regardless of whether or not anything serious happens to Reddit, it’s just not the same for me anymore and I won’t be going back. I can see the vibe and audience further shifting ala Twitter. It’s too big to just fail, Digg, MySpace and other older sites still exist, they’re just shadows of themselves now.

It’s just a small multi-time fee of 500 morbillion dollars, jeez, just pay the redditorino CEO a fair price, you 3rd party bullies.

There's also been a lot of misinformation and misunderstandings going on regarding the blackout, which doesn't help.

It’s funny how these social companies get huge and think they are irreplaceable… when all of them started as a replacement for something else.

Once you think you’re too big to fail? That’s when ya trip.

I think back to this article quite a bit, lately. The basic idea is that social media sites seem, by the numbers, to be doing fine, and then they abruptly collapse. The trick is that when the people who create high engagement - people who make posts that make people super happy or angry or whatever, as long as they are feeling something and therefor getting engaged - when those people start to post less because they're spending some of their energy on some other new site, the old one gets kinda hollowed out. It's not obvious it's dying until it's dead.

I don't know if reddit is done for, but I can say that lemmy and mastodon are feeling a lot more fleshed out, lately, compared to past waves of people coming from twitter. It feels like turning a corner, or crossing a critical mass threshold; it's getting easier to stay engaged and not feel the need to check the old giant sites.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1048

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113

I think once these two issues are solved, the average user really isn't going to have any problem with lemmy.

In case you want to go that route: I made a bot that posts links to posts in a list of lemmy communities to a subreddit, optionally with flair and a comment of what is going on, to be run in a fully restricted subreddit (i.e., no comments show up at all, new posts need to be made via lemmy)

Nothing will ever feel the same. It's an illusion to think that one platform will ever 'replace' another. In my 20+ years of being online (oh, God), that has never happened. Platforms will eventually fade away or become unbearable, but the void will be filled by many other niche platforms. Google+ didn't succeed because it aimed to replace Facebook. Now it's WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, it's BeReal, it's Instagram, it's TikTok. My guess is that it will be Lemmy for the nerds, Reddit for what "they" think it's for (when I look at "new" Reddit — something like 9gag), and other platforms for what I can't think of yet. However, the Fediverse certainly reminds me of the internet as it was about 15 years ago when it focused on open protocols and similar aspects. XMPP comes to mind. I am filled with joy when experiencing the freedom and prospect of an Internet without dependency on but commercial companies again.

Can you recommend a decent RSS client on Android? What feeds do you use?

I understand why some people would want to do this, but there's a lot of stuff there that I would hate to be gone forever.

There's an old game - I always forget which game it is until it happens again - that I play once every few years, but which always gives me problems when installing or starting for the first time. And every time I looked for a solution, I always ended up in the same Reddit thread; one with a solution that always worked. After I landed there a few times, I even left a comment thanking them for it.

I don't so much want Reddit gone forever, as I just want for there to be more competition and for users to be spread out. Or, maybe even better, for there to be a searchable archive of Reddit.

https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

All you have to do is follow a link from this page, then drag a bookmark to your bookmarks bar, then go to your reddit user page and click the bookmark. You can even tell it what to replace your stuff with if you want to.

I replaced all my comments with garbage

Check if that change stuck. I am trying to do the same and reddit keeps restoring my original comment history.

I like it, but it CONSTANTLY crashes for me. Every single time

That won't change anything. The financial incentives from investors driving this will demand similar policies even if they get redressed in different marketing.

i like Steve Huffsglue better.

Doesn't matter who is ceo. China will just find another puppet.

Ya there's nothing wrong with Huffing men.

That's the thing that kills me. There was a time when Digg was the king. Also for a while Slashdot. We left before and we can leave again.

I am liking Lemmy so far.

I don't think Reddit will immediately reverse course, but I think the protest has been an absolute win simply by giving the alternative communities far more growth than they would have otherwise.

Reddit needs competition to feel threatened.

We'll see! According to https://reddark.untone.uk/ more than 60% of the protesting subs are still shutdown now, well past the end of the official 2 day protest, including quite a few big ones (funny, art, science, gaming, pics, sport, DIY, food). Even if half of Reddit comes back, it's hard to avoid the sensation that it's broken right now, and surely that'll hit the user & traffic numbers.

The users making a difference is my opinion too. This isn't going to change a lot if the users don't change where they're going. I'm hoping that more people brake free of the grasp that reddit has on them and realize that the alternatives are there.

No one is expecting this to shutdown reddit. But for a lot of people it's the straw that broke the camels back in the sense that they are now looking for new alternatives. Reddit was started by early adopters finding a niche place to have fun. With this, it's competitors will too

the 24 hour news cycle happened

but man, whatever happened to editorial review?

🖐️😲💨 Poof

yep, those subs will see a slower fade as their users need to make sure that there is a platform to assist them alongside their mod team, be it here or in other platform, 100% understandable

How do I sign up to this? I can't seem to search for it from my instance. (Probably a bad search str)

It will be interesting to see how effectively people are made aware of the switch and how many make the move. Lemmy is more effort than Reddit to find what it is you want.

The whole point is that you can't access them.