The fediverse is not a single database or server. It's a protocol and standard that's distributed by design. The fediverse as a whole cannot be centrally monetized, just like email can't be monetized. A single provider could potentially choose to try to monetize either by requiring a subscription or showing ads, exactly like email providers do, but if you ever feel like they've stopped providing a good service you can just switch to another instance just like you can switch to another email provider.

Unlike a centralized service like Reddit, you're not locked into a monopoly. Switching instances does not lock you out of the system as a whole, just like you can still receive email if you switch to another provider. With Reddit you can only access the platform through Reddit because it's a closed source centralized monopoly.

One thing the fediverse seems to lack as far as I can tell is a way to link accounts, like how you can set up forwarding with email, which helps you switch providers. But the protocol and standard is still being developed so maybe that's something that can happen in the future

It goes deeper than that.

This all started with the API changes. Before they were charging a fair price for the API and companies happily paid it for the convenience. Then Elon got greedy he started charging a ridiculous amount for the API so those companies decided it would be worth it to just deal with the annoyance and switch to scraping the website instead. But when you hit the website it's way less efficient than hitting the API because it's doing a bunch of mixing and ranking which is a lot more complicated and costly than serving static content, which costs a small fraction of real time algorithmic ranking. So now instead of making money off companies that want their data they're losing money on the cloud costs to serve the scrapers.

More recently, they haven't been paying their hosting bills to Google and their service was set to expire at the end of last month. What just happened at the start of this month? They added the limitations. That can't be a coincidence. Now the Google services weren't hosting the site itself, otherwise they'd probably be fully down right now, but it was hosting their trust and safety services for things like fighting spam. That could have also been hosting anti scraper services as well. Since they're so under staffed they probably couldn't swap the services in time, so instead of having anti scraping services like every other big company on the internet, they decided to cut service instead. It's just built up incompetence coming to a head.

Spez didn't borrow billions of dollars he has to pay back with interest though so he won't need to fire almost all his engineers.

He did however send all the most talented developers working under the platform to his biggest competitor so that wasn't smart.

But there are so many ways Reddit could have played this better. It wasn't just about monetizing. The API changes were in bad faith and meant to kill 3rd party apps without flat out doing it. Users would have been understanding if they charged a reasonable amount of started injecting ads into the API feeds, but instead they went full aggro and disrespected not just the devs working to make their platform better, but the users as well. If they wanted 3rd party apps to show their ads or charge a fee to remove ads I would have been understanding, but because of the disrespect I've dropped them.

Excuse me for a second.

Buahahahahahahahahwhahahahahah!

Text feed are the lightest weight most cachable thing you can serve. The costliest part of the text component is the mixer that ranks the content. The companies scraping them don't care about the ranking they just want bulk tweets. That's what the API is for. Elon charged them insane rates so they all went off the API that cost Twitter a tiny fraction to serve and instead the API consumers switched to crawling the website instead, which costs Twitter orders of magnitude more, but is free for scrapers. Elon is indeed a stable genius.

For me I found the new Reddit desktop site completely unusable. I hated everything about it. On desktop I used old.reddit with RES.

On mobile their 1st party app was similarly shitty like their new desktop ui. The 3rd party apps were much better but I didn't necessarily prefer then over the old+RES desktop website.

Main reason I also used mobile apps was that I could browse Reddit while taking a shit.

What is this email you speak of? Is it popular? Surely it can't be that popular if it's a decentralized open protocol and standard.

They're not just mentioning Lemmy they're making a new app for it!

I actually like fahrenheit for weather. 0 is really fucking cold, 100 is really fucking hot.

I think it's because these are actual communities. The admins are just regular people you can talk to like normally. You choose your community. They're not faceless corporations and I think when a network is a corporation the platform gets less respectful conversation for understandable reasons.

"see? Despite limiting access we actually gained users"

Reddit was down all the time during the digg migration

Reading posts? 600 would go by very quickly and 6000 could be scrolled through by a power user pretty easily which sucks for a paid account.

Yeah that's a great point. I think it would be hard to fully lock other clients out, but you could have an early internet style situation where you had some websites not supporting all browsers.

I guess I didn't account for climate change getting quite that bad

Before Reddit there was digg and the users left for Reddit because digg was the one pulling shenanigans back then. Reddit definitely had competition even back then.

Yeah I don't see how it's possible to provide that service for free, and I'd be willing to pay for YouTube premium if they didn't treat their creators like crap. The creators that do well on YouTube are the worst because they play the clickbait bullshit algorithm game and all the creators I like that put out high quality content have a hard time making a living

I wouldn't mind paying a subscription for video if I knew the money actually went to the creators, but YouTube is so anti creator that I don't want them taking a cut.

They also wanted control over the user base, so they could do more intrusive bullshit to push more ads onto users. With the fediverse there's no monopoly on the platform so no one instance can get full control and abuse their power. With Reddit the only choice was to either submit or leave completely. With Lemmy all you need to do is swap instances.