This is my first post and isn’t meant to be inflammatory but to provoke thought and ask some serious questions. A lot of people here and on Reddit seem surprised, confused, upset, disoriented, etc. that Reddit made the decisions they did and many people may not like what I have to say.
I empathize with people’s frustrations about Reddit, but what the hell did they expect? Did they think that by being loyal to a company that the company would reciprocate loyalty back to them? Did they think that Reddit was a benevolent entity with a history of doing the right thing?
For over 30 years software developers have encountered this issue. Many prominent developers decided that if the source code wasn’t free and open to use and change that your product was at the whim of a corporation. They realized that if you couldn’t easily sync/backup and take your data with you and host it yourself that you didn’t really own it. They even realized the licensing issues and created reusable licenses so that companies using and profiting from their software had to legally publish their changes and make them free as well. It isn’t a new concept, but many people suddenly act surprised.
These mods and volunteers of Reddit willingly made a choice to give their time and energy to a company for free and Reddit made it clear that they shouldn’t expect anything in return. Was Reddit publicly and transparently developing a federated platform at the same time to make their communities decentralized? Were they making it easy to export your data and create your own independent instances that you host and own yourself?
The truth hurts, but in all honesty these people were nothing more than useful idiots for Reddit. The good news is that if you were one of those useful idiots that you now have a choice.
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You can pretend Lemmy, Mastodon, etc. are just like Reddit and do nothing different. Maybe the developers will be able to keep up and add new features, or maybe Reddit or some other company will offer them lucrative positions to take their talents elsewhere. Companies like Reddit fear nothing more than open source outpacing them. Governments fear nothing more than communities not being controlled by a centralized authority. The potential of Lemmy and other federated projects will be the target of multi-million dollar campaigns and billionaires will do everything they can to make sure they don’t compete or succeed.
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You can donate your time in creating quality bug reports, issues, feature requests, etc. You can learn what decentralization and federation mean for you and others and become an advocate for Lemmy and other like-minded projects. You can educate your family and friends. If you work for a company, you can take a hard stance on using and implementing open source solutions in your organization. Yes, your company can even have its own internal Lemmy instance! You can learn development skills and submit improvements yourself. You can donate to Lemmy and other open source projects to help other developers work on the project full-time. You can support organizations and non-profits like NLnet that help create and fund Lemmy and other open source projects. You can ask your Lemmy instance admins and moderators what you can do to help ensure their long-term success.
If you choose option 1, don’t act surprised next time when things don’t pan out. Don’t be surprised if the features you think are important aren’t implemented. Don’t be surprised if the instances can’t keep up with the traffic or spam and have to shutdown. Afterall, you’ll probably leave anyway for the next E Corp product announcement until you realize you were a useful idiot again.
However, if you choose option 2, imagine what this place can become. Imagine what happens when Reddit truly fails and the communities win. Imagine what happens when Muskrat or Zuckerbot is no longer in charge. Imagine what happens when politicians and companies are no longer in control of your data and tuning algorithms to get you to consume. Imagine what happens when you can take your data and leave and start your own community with your own terms, and choose who you federate with and what you want to see.
Imagine! That is all. Signing off for now.
There’s something I find quite concerning: on a recent poll on r/redditalternatives the “best” alternative by a large amount is squabbles.io, then beehaw, fediverse “regular” instances (kbin, lemmy) only coming in 3rd and 4th position.
If that poll really reflects the opinion of the average reddit Joe (I tend to take external polls with a grain of salt as they can easily be brigaded), not only people are voting en masse for a centralized solution - again, but also they’re favoring the maverick fediverse instance over proper ones.
Even more concerning, this snippet taken from squabbles.io’s privacy policy:
To put it bluntly: brace yourselves, we will sell your data (and likely the company) as soon as we get enough dough from it.
I see it another way. The Fediverse took 3 slots out of the top 4. The vote is just split among the instances. Add them up and I assume Fediverse wins?
I like the way you’re thinking, I certainly lack a bit of perspective after all that pessimistic-driving reddit ruckus. Gotta shed those old habits and reflexes.
Still, the worrying proportion of users ready to renew the “feed the beast” experience raises some concern. Rejoining @timewarp here, we have to inform people and spread the good news.