A non trivial amount of users. That makes me happy.
I actually think it will be much bigger. I'd be surprised if there aren't a lot of users in the wait-and-see-how-bad-it's-really-going-to-be camp, although they probably won't start showing up until a few days after the 1st.
Yep, especially considering the clear improvements that are constantly being implemented and the higher activity levels than before, what makes Lemmy/kbin feel more like a good alternative where people should migrate to
Personally, I'd never even heard of Lemmy, Kbin etc until recent events and thought it was limited to only Mastodon which never really interested me.
The amount of software development recent events have inspired around the Fediverse seems to be just the kick it needed to have a bright future too.
Same. Was aware of mastadon, but I never liked twitter and didn't want a twitter alternative.
I mean, kbin's been in development for a bit, but we only really started hearing about it generally in the Fediverse like a month ago? Maybe 6 weeks ago? Kbin.social is only a few weeks old.
The developer set up a testing environment, and then Reddit jumped aboard basically immediately.
I hit up kbin first but was having some issues with it, which makes sense as I was probably in the middle of the swarm. I jumped to shitjustworks, because it did what it said on the tin. I do think kbin would be a better fit, has it smoothed out any?
He will try to purge the "-test" strings from every fucking infra and code he has for years because of this.
Yeah same. I've actually been using Mastodon a bit and so far enjoyed it a surprising amount. Had some casual but nice exchanges with folks over there. I think leaving reddit is helping me diversify my media consumption habits which is a really good thing imo, if only for the sake of my sanity. Like many others, I don't think I was quite aware of how reliant I'd become on reddit as a source of new, entertainment etc etc.
Precisely how I feel on it. Would it have been magical if the protest resulted in every last user leaving reddit behind for better alternatives? Of course. But that was never something I thought was likely. However, it's caused a lot of us who were already unhappy to leave and come over to the Fediverse, and I do think that's a success.
It's not like Reddit was even likely to die. I think we all knew the best case outcome that was still grounded in reality was something like Reddit falling into a slow but certain nose dive.
I mean, even Twitter is still kicking despite all the horrible stuff that's gone on there. Reddit isn't Twitter levels of bad. A slow decline was the best we could have hoped for.
Honestly, we wouldn't have been able to scale to a massive migration, anyway. A slow migration is ideal for scaling and community building.
Whether Reddit dies or not also depends on what you consider "Reddit" to be.
Will reddit.com go down? No. Likely not for a generation, at least. Will Reddit be totally unrecognizable in the future? Probably not.
Will it be a souless zombie, kept operational by nothing more than its brand name and advertising?
Yes. Yes it will.
Just like Digg, digg is still technically around since the website is still up. Though it's not really Digg anymore. It's just some random news site now, you would never guess that it was once one of the most active forms on the internet.
That's where Reddit is headed, any arguments trying to push otherwise are pure cope by Reddit addicts, who just want to keep scrolling forever and don't want to have to start over from the beginning on a different platform that might be alien to them. They're going to have to though, even the people who were loyal enough to stay with Digg until the end had to move on at some point.
All very good points! So yeah, I'm taking what victories I can, in this case my victories are having found the Fediverse and no longer being on reddit ☺️
We're already pushing the limits with our current numbers moving in. A mass migration would have been way too much.
IDK I guess I kinda hoped that people would realize how stupid and exploitative the whole system of reddit is and the site would get overrun with spam and turned into an archive site. Was very disappointed in that pipe dream.
It's going to be a long, slow process. The people who quit and deleted their accounts are part of it. The people who are just using it a lot less are part of it. The communities continuing to protest in their own unique ways to continue to raise awareness are part of it. The 3rd party app devs telling their sides of the story are part of it. People who get bored or curious when their communities slow down and go looking elsewhere will be part of it. The flurry of negative news is a big part of it. And the more all the other stuff continues, the more the negative press continues, and Huffman is doing himself 0 favors in any of his interviews.
I know. Me too. It fucking sucks that we don't see larger, more consistent examples of unity over issues like this. Part of me is grateful for the amount of people that did port over, and part of me is mad at that grateful part, thinking that I should--we should--be able to expect more. And part of me wants to take the victories that I can. It's not a simple issue, so I'm trying to hold on to the faith that I have left that we'll figure all of this shit out and do what I can in the meantime.
It's a difficult thing to measure, since it won't necessarily be a leap from just one platform to another.
I saw a meme on Tumblr about redditors remembering they had "dual Tumblr citizenship" all along. A lot of people are exploring a bunch of different options simultaneously (me included) and that's pretty great.
But yeah, we'll figure it out I hope!
I still lurk. I expected the slow decline and change in character that others here have predicted.
What I have seen in the last 8 days floored me. Continues to floor me. Reddit is already a zombie platform. Front page is week-old posts. Bot generated reposts from 2 weeks ago.
And astroturf posts trying to spin the whole thing as a "what was that blip?" Or "glad those whiners are gone"
It happened so much faster than I expected.
Oh, I think it's hurt Reddit more than it seems on the surface. Of course they will say "it's not working" but reading between the lines of this Engadget article [1], the number of ad impressions would be down rather significantly. Note the difference between time spent on site (seeing ads) and "visits" -- many of which were likely people checking on the site rather than participating in the site. I think this is taking a toll, and am hopeful this situation will serve as an example of poor leadership for the next generation (Digg being a previous example).
Reddit was not going to change its mind.
Honestly, I thought they might. Not to cancel the API fees entirely like some wanted, but to reach a compromise with developers that would increase Reddit's revenue and let the apps stay in business.
But it's become clear since then that killing the third party apps isn't an accident or side effect, but the explicit intention of the API changes. Now I can't see Reddit compromising as long as spez is in charge.
I still have a dim hope it could happen. The protests aren't over and Reddit is feeling it.
Have you seen Huffman's comments regarding Musk's handling of twitter?
I was rather surprised and not a little scandalised to find that Huffman found this inspiring.
I kinda hope I'm wrong but I think the chances of any kind of concessions here are slim to none.
Yes, I jumped ship to mastodont after Elon took over and Twitter is still a thing. It's slowly getting worse and worse but some users just don't want to leave.
Yeah, I first took a look at lemmy and others a few weeks ago, when everyone was asking "what's an alternative?" and at the time, despite so many people talking about the fediverse, there weren't that many people or threads. And now look how active some communities are becoming!
Not to overstate the obvious, but this isn’t over yet, the third party apps are still operating. If news outlets were doing their job they would stick to the facts instead of making a judgment on the situation by declaring it a failure. The story is still developing and it’s only just beginning.
Well said. The news outlets calling the protests a failure are making statements that they aren't qualified to make. Unless you have at least one foot in the fediverse, you really wouldn't have any way of knowing the extent of this paradigm shift.
Yea your very right. I wasn't really super aware of the situation, until I came here on the 11th, and that was on a whim tbh. I've since been educated on the implications of this from privacy to politics.
Looking at fedidb, the graph has started looking real exponential in the last 48 hours.
And this is still days before the third party apps actually stop working. The exodus aint even close to peaked yet.
Edit: dear lord the user count has spiked. We broke 200 000 threadiverse users just a few days ago, and we are about hit 400 000.
This is true, and for the most part extremely good news... But are also stories circulating about a landslide of bot accounts being created on Lemmy recently so numbers from the last 24h or so may want adjusting down slightly.
They could do better than just accepting spez statements.
The obvious is the most glossed over ime. And it's usually super interesting, and hard to swallow. 👌 I'm following the story very closely, and I only used reddit for a year. Lol. I'm wondering what it'd take for them to back pedal, outside of some deep epiphany.
It obviously had an impact because reddit wouldn't have taken such draconian action in response. Reddit admins have been forced to show their ass to the public, and many people who previously had positive or neutral opinions of Steve Huffman & co. have now seen what a manipulative, dishonest group they are. They are looking to harvest more user data at a point when no reasonable person would entrust them with this data. They are looking to expand advertising at a point when a significant number of users have either jumped ship or are remaining behind only to actively sabotage the site. More and more people have come to understand that migrating to the fediverse is no big hurdle.
Of course reddit will pay certain outlets to report that the protest has been a failure, but to me it looks like it has been a great success. We knew reddit wouldn't reverse its decision, and we knew it wouldn't just disappear (Digg is still around ffs), but a lot of people have seen that ... reddit the web site never really meant that much to us.
I’m a normal user and just want a place to browse comments and read comments I don’t care if it’s Reddit or something else.
Reddit admins have been forced to show their ass to the public, and many people who previously had positive or neutral opinions of Steve Huffman & co. have now seen what a manipulative, dishonest group they are
There's a long tail here that will get spez in the ass later, and that's been the Verge, NYT, Forbes, and so many mainstream outlets that were previous incurious about spez having to talk to him and report on his AMA. He could very quickly end up characterized as a Musk-like buffoon if that's how people who need to make their money from ink start to see him, especially if he doesn't manage to find a new personality before he opens his mouth again. Like the average Redditor, spez doesn't think he's transparent when he's being smug or snarky, and that is particularly visible to journalists who have degrees in snark.
Excellent point, but I just want to comment on this:
He could very quickly end up characterized as a Musk-like buffoon…
Steve Huffman idolizes Elon Musk. Being characterized as any flavor of Musk-like would be taken in as praise rather than the condemnation that is intended.
Yeah the blackout resulted in a sustainable alternative to Reddit, which tbf didn’t exist before the blackout. I call that a huge win.
I think it was a success no matter how mainstream news outlets or Reddit want to spin it.
The mods of subreddits very cleverly pointed out that the direction Reddit is heading in stinks and even all the masses who don't care about it still got the message though being inconvenienced by not having access to their favorite echo chamber for a few days. Just look at all the comments on "should we open up" posts from pissed off mouth breathers basically demanding they return things to normal.
At the end of the day, of cause Reddit was going to force mods to open up their subs or remove them. The mods never really had any power in the situation anyway and the precedent of Reddit just taking over subs was already well established. If Lemmy or Kbin was another 5+ years in development with a couple of much larger communities already well established then the exodus might have approached Digg levels again, but the lack of easy mainstream alternatives means that Reddit was always going to get its way eventually.
The news, despite our perception, has largely never been about speaking truth to the injustices around us. Both historically and now, its used largely as a veiled mouthpiece of the powerful around us who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The examples that we think of when groundbreaking journalism comes to mind are almost always the exception and often end poorly for the brave who bring them to light.
Over the past 5 years this has become even more salient to me. I've been to protests and the coverage will produce an entirely different picture that gets presented to those not in attendance. There were protests in my city during the party primary debates and the footage was edited to make crowds look smaller and in the case of our DSA chapter, they cut to a different camera anytime they were about to be in frame.
Trying not be be tin foil hatty there, but was at the marches and then watched all the different feeds. Calling something so obviously curated "news" feels like the information dystopia has been here much longer than we give it credit.
It didn't fail, r/all is a shit show right now. Or, it's a porn show. Porn is all over r/all, r/popular is getting hit by it. F-u/spez made front page porn popular again. A lot of the porn pages have switched to other things; only fans being only fans, literally. Etc. you get the idea. I cannot imagine the board is happy.
Idc what happens tbh. I mean I care, in that I want everyone to feel the joy I have felt here, but most people aren't like that. And tbh, I really like that this space is still community vibing. It's something that I have personally been looking for, without even knowing it.
I'm curious where this goes, and how reddit and it's users perform once the 30th comes and down the line.
I went over and dropped a couple comments about my feelings and left. Maybe someone will follow.
Yeah, Im pretty happy over here, so for me, the protest was a blazing success.
Yeah that's understandable, I've gone scorched earth myself, deleted all of my comments and posts as well as my account and I feel better for it, I just hope others come to those terms and follow suit.
I wanted to do that "As AI language model" or whatever to corrupt some stuff, but none of my comments are over a year old. So I'm slowly just manually deleting them. I'm trying to sift thru them cause there's writing there that I'd love to save.
I agree. Most people probably don't care about the protest. But I'm curious to see whether the group that does care, and then moves to a fediverse service, contains enough of the content creators that people visit reddit for to make those people also move over.
I really think it'll be noticeable tbh. I've found that almost every post here is interesting. Lots of window dressing over there on reddit.
This is certainly what I think will happen. People that want to shout into the digital void or just people not really into digitalized socialization, bumbling around trying to figure everything out (so no truly original content posted) will be left.
IMHO Reddit's prime base was high knowledge digital media surfers. They'll be all gone.
I think the biggest impact that the protest has had was to reveal Reddit’s true colours, and to therefore split the user base into two groups: the people that give a shit, and those that don’t.
IMO, it’s the people that give a shit that made Reddit a good place to be in the first place and created the attraction for everyone else. I also have a feeling that the GivvaShittas^tm^ are the bunch that are moving to the Fediverse en-masse and I’m happy to be coming with them.
This absolutely, it seems like the people that truly wanted a fully community driven platform have left and found an alternative with kbin and lemmy. I've been enjoying my time so far and will continue to stay in the fediverse for as long as possible.
https://reddark.untone.uk currently shows 3413 out of 8829 subreddits as dark, five days after the blackout's official end date.
That's 39 percent -- even if adjusted for subs that were always private, still roughly one third.
Honestly I feel that the outcome was optimal.
If Reddit collapsed over this I don't believe the infrastructure exists at this time to onboard all those members, so it's a blessing in disguise.
A couple of weeks ago, I realized how things were likely to play out, and that I'd end up leaving Reddit. I wasn't looking forward to it, but I knew it would be necessary. The shitty way spez has handled things turned me from a reluctant ship-jumper into an enthusiastic one.
It's going to be rough in a few weeks when even more Redditors jump ship, but we'll get through the chaos.
IMHO, it's still a success. Reddit's behavior has provided clear proof of the need for an alternative. Plenty have taken notice. The winds of change are blowing...and it is likely not in Reddit's favor in the long term.
The big thing that everyone should understand is that there seems to be no negotiation ... no middle ground ... either you stay on Reddit and you suck up all the advertising or you don't
I wasn't quite sure what to do and I drifted in and out of my account for a while and thought protesting, sharing memes or trying to circumvent rules or something ... then I just realized ... the worst thing anyone can do to a social media site is to simply just stop using it at all
Once you abandon Reddit, you've done the most damage you could possibly do
Social media is built on human participation ... of all kinds, positive, negative, hateful, loving, inclusive, exclusive ... it doesn't matter what the participation is, as long as you participate
So once you leave ... you've severed a section of the site to let it die ... if enough people do the same, the rot of users abandoning reddit will turn the site into an empty billion dollar shell that will quickly become worthless
Once you abandon Reddit, you've done the most damage you could possibly do
I would say that's not exactly the case, if you just quietly delete your Reddit account and choose to go peacefully you aren't doing the most damage that you could do. I would say doing the most damage will be to spread the word for other people and try and help them leave the platform, before ultimately leaving yourself.
Just leaving without doing anything is essentially just fucking off, it's exactly what the scabs there want. For anybody who's protesting or against this to just leave quietly without making a big stink.
Ultimately you are right in that leaving is the worst thing you can do, but unless you enlighten people on your way out you won't do the worst damage you could possibly do (legally of course).
I would like to point out that the Digg migration didn't happen overnight. It happened over the course of weeks and months, even though ten years later it feels like it happened overnight. There were plenty of people saying "fuck off, Digg is fine" after v4 launched.
I am not going back after june30, Reddit ceo behaviour is something people should go against, even if it’s Apple i would dump them all and make the switch
Especially since Reddit is user generated content there’s no point to stick to it regardless
Those mods who are helping in needs should make extra effort to help user transition out of Reddit too, those who could help should also
It’s user generated content for Christ sake!
Yes that is my concern as well. There seems to be an Elon effect for CEOs where they are thinking they can say and do whatever and it will barely affect them.
I am just one person but I don't want to contribute to their egos and harmful behavior.
I have a few thoughts on the situation:
The 'Oh we're protesting with a two-day blackout' was the wrong way to go about the announcement since all that says, as has been pointed out, is 'see you Monday then.' Yet it wasn't just a two-day protest. Some came back but many didn't.
The News, be it outlets or people like Rossman, want grand gestures. They want Results. Having people trickle leave isn't dramatic, and it's hard to keep track of especially if reports are true that deleted accounts are undeleted and posts are unscrambled for the sake of searchability. As of this writing my account is listed as deleted and posts I care to find are u/[deleted] but that doesn't mean it isn't happening. If that's happening then it's impossible to tell who's Quit quit, walked away, or deleted their accounts only for it to be undeleted.
While tinfoil; the undeleting of accounts would track for someone desperate just before an IPO.
The alternatives are still in their infancy, at least when it comes to lemmy, hive, and kbin. PHP forums never went away. Hell, Ye Olden BBS's didn't go away. However, there's no monolithic Giant emerging to come to eat Reddit's lunch. So it's easy to paint any dissent as ' Redditors are never happy.'
The stereotype of 'all Reddit mods are the same. cling to fake power and they all are neckbeard pear-shaped basement-dwellers who never bathe haha look at how pathetic they are.' That is seductive to fall into as a narrative because like it or not a LOT of people want someone they can kick down at. Mods flipping to back a fash like u/spez for the sake of fake power gives people someone they can point at. 'We didn't get results because of YOU.'
Yet these are the same people who are organizing malicious compliance reorganizations of subreddits and policies have changed. Mods have been told 'comply or be replaced.' We don't know if admins handed the old username over or not to both smear the outgoing mod and to preserve a false continuity or not. We only know some subs have unlocked after the gun got leveled at their heads.
As someone with a patchy at best history against authority in online communities my sympathies are actually with the mods. Unpaid, having to herd cats, get shit on from the userbase, shit on from on high, and without anything major and high profile? They're getting shit on by otherwise 'liked' personalities such as Rossman when they tend to be the people holding thigns together day to day.
This is not a game of instant results. Modern culture has shifted to NOW! NOW NOW NOW NOW! RESULTS NOW OR IT IS A FAILURE! This is a long game of bleeding reddit dry of relevance. Reddit won't be killed, but it will be a shell of itself and it won't be seen as The Place to go to for answers.
As others have stated, news outlets lie. They don't have a story here so they will make one. Protesters crushed. Who knew internet-addicted Millenials are too spineless to see things through. Millennials are killing protests. Etc etc. Boomers get to feel smug.
Turning mods and power users off Reddit, even casual users who are getting tired of the disarray in their subscribed subreddits are unsubscribing - I definitely think it's having an impact.
Well, Gab is still kinda around and so is """TrUtH Social....it'll be a garbage bin that collects nationalists and pr0n soon enough.
I have always appreciated the work of the moderators because I prefer lively content without nastiness. A busy, well moderated forum can be a delight. When the mods in my favorite subreddits told us how hard their jobs would become, I knew what I had to do. I'm happy to find such a worthwhile (if yet young) place to land. By the end of the month I will have put Reddit behind me. They can succeed or fail without me. I suspect it will be somewhere in between. Actually, what I think is that it will become much nastier in many subreddits, and overall less worthwhile. I think individual subreddit rules will give way to mere reddit rules, where for instance a woman who posts pics in a sewing subreddit of herself in the dress she made may find herself subjected to sexual comments which would previously be subject to moderation.
Reddit admins made it perfectly clear they're not interested in feedback or compromises, they've quadrupled down on that point.
The way they handled this situation clearly shows their contempt for their user base, they want you to create as much content as possible and farm engagement so it looks good for their IPO.
The best thing people can do is either quit entirely and migrate to sites like this one or at the very minimum only use Reddit for lurking, don't post, don't upvote / downvote, simply cost them resources as that's how they see their user base, a bunch of parasites
You know, I used to be that guy. spez looks cool. He's great. Reddit is one of the good guys, defenders of free speech. They do things better than other big tech - like if you get permabanned you can still log in and see your history, you can still download and save your content, not like when FB or Google kicks you out, etc etc.
But what the protests taught me is that, even this isn't good enough. Reddit's not one of the good guys. It was a hard lesson to learn, but one that I needed to learn.
Rather than being the exception, I'd guess that there are a lot more like me who have had their eyes open. And now open and looking for alternatives.
Great article with much more detail than what I quote: https://lifehacker.com/...
Critics of the blackout wondered how a two-day protest is going to solve anything. My friends, let me speak to you for a moment from my perspective as a person who has more than a little familiarity with taking collective action to get out-of-touch CEOs to do the right thing.
While a strike or a blackout may be the most visible action in a campaign, it’s never the only one. Leading up to both our 2022 strike, and our 2019 seemingly uneventful signing of a fair contract, we lived and breathed by something called an escalation chart (same idea as the one illustrated here). You start with small actions, and build on them, with a clear plan for how you’ll continue if your demands are not met. A strike is almost always preceded by dozens of smaller actions.
Fixed-length walkouts and strikes are one possible step on the chart. The idea is to send a message: This many of us are this committed. After that, you don’t stop. You keep escalating. Even on an open-ended strike, the idea is to become more and more of a problem to the company over time. You get more and more media attention; the company suffers more and more from lost business. Collective actions are effective because they are part of a larger escalation.
The article also mentions some successes the protest already achieved:
- “accessibility-focused apps” will be exempted from the new policy
- several advertisers chose to spend their advertising budgets elsewhere
- exempt certain tools used by “verified moderators” from the new API policy
A (quite impressively long) list of concessions and agreements can be found in /r/ModCoord
And as others mentioned in this thread, it spurred a migration and more people than ever (me included) finally engage with the fediverse.
My summary is: The protest had a huge impact. Sure, we did not (fully) get what we want, and reddit remains committed to becoming evil. But we won some battles, and the war isn't over yet.
It also brought people to things they might never have done before; to engage in protests and to discuss forms and strategies of resistance. Many joined the fediverse in the process, here to stay. I feel the importance of this exercise in self-efficacy and self-empowerment cannot be understated.
my kbin feed is already indistinguishable from my reddit home page, voat never felt like this. I don't care if it takes ten years for kbin to get to that level, I'm here now and I can only see myself going to reddit if it's the only place that a solution to a problem comes up in a search engine
Like others have said, I think whether the protests failed depends on what you wanted them to accomplish. Yes, Reddit is largely trying to ignore the protests and forging ahead with its changes. No, the site didn't collapse overnight like some were hoping. But the fediverse has gotten a big boost in both users and attention thanks to all this, so there is a silver lining even if the protest didn't get Reddit to reverse course. What happens in the long term is anyone's guess, but there are already growing communities here and it's not like this is going to be the last time Reddit is going to screw something up.
Iv'e been looking at fedidb's threadiverse page, and ooh-boy... In the last 48 hours that graph is starting to look real ready to go exponential...
And the third party apps haven't even actually stopped working yet.
I have seen it called a failure on Reddit because some mods were either forcefully removed or gave in once they were threatened with removal. At which point, as some people here have been saying, they switched tactics to flooding the subs with funny images instead. There are also videos from people like Louis Rossmann who is disappointed with how easily some mods gave in.
For those who don't know, he put in monumental effort trying to get a right to repair bill passed in his state, only to get back doored at the last minute by weasel words in the bill, effectively neutering it at the 11th hour. Meanwhile, people with realistically nothing on the line are caving to pressure over the ability to moderate a social media website. It's understandably disheartening for him.
The protests have definitely made some sort of impact, even if it's not the initially intended impact. It has drawn media and public attention to the situation, it has dragged reddit's reputation into the ground, and it has exposed Reddit the Company's true colours and intentions for everyone to see, including the casual user who may not have cared about the API situation in the first place. Whether this has been for the good or for the bad is debatable. IMO we are now watching the disintegration of reddit in real time, and a few months later, after everything settles, reddit will still be here but it will no longer be the same. We have seen this happen before with Tumblr, Digg etc. And the Fediverse will grow and expand, and with some luck and effort, hopefully it can become something great.
Wasn't a fail to me. I moved on from Reddit after 12 years of daily activity. I'm happily settling into Kbin now.
Not failed at all.
@Defaced Agree, I don't think Reddit was every likely to die from the protests, in that sense it wasn't a success. However, the fact that viable alternatives exist and more will pop up because of the protest makes it a success in my book.
The protest planted the seeds, it might take a while to see the fruit.
Theres been plenty of "articles" with biased view points, jumping in on the false narrative that this is a protest driven by a small number of mods. Meanwhile Reddit is bleeding users
I know I probably wouldn't have bothered checking all "this" out if that hadn't happened. I was never active on Twitter, but what's happening on Reddit seems similar to how Musk "ruined" twitter (from what I hear from folks who were/are active on there).
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
Whether or not it’s was a failure depends on what you expected from it. Reddit was not going to change its mind. The investors demand more money and will continue to squeeze Reddit for ever dime the can. It wasn’t going to die overnight either.
What did happen is a non-trivial amount of users left and found the Fediverse. Apps are currently being developed to make it more accessible to your average user. The Fediverse will no longer be some obscure thing for a niche group. I think it was a huge success and will have long term repercussions for Reddit.
save