If it weren't for the blackout I:
1: Never would've heard of Lemmy
2: Likely not have tried it
3: Wouldn't have had the inclination to stick around and learn
4: Started to like how Lemmy is laid out.
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Neccessity is the mother of federation!
lol
Yeah I've been pleasantly surprised. Definitely smaller, but I think that has its advantages.
this is my favorite comment on here so far
I'm loving this non stop coverage of the blackout. It can't be a good luck for investors interested in reddit
Well this article was pretty much how Reddit has become a vital part of peoples daily life, so if I were an investor I'd view this article as reason to invest.
No mention of alternatives being in the spotlight that's a bit too bad
To be perfectly honest, Lemmy has had staggering growth regardless of the lack of media attention. And I'm not entirely certain that's a bad thing.
Look at my home instance of lemmy.world, for example. When I joined pre-blackout, we had around 800 members. Now, two server upgrades later, we're at nearly 18,000. If only a fraction of those newcomers stay, it's still enough to jumpstart organic growth, even if it's slow. And it gives us time to really develop.
Maybe that's a glass-half-full outlook, but I'm optimistic.
Reddit often felt fragile to me. Like we have all the goods in the same basket and it's just a matter of time before something bad happens. I've been here about 24 hours now and it's starting to grow on me. Really hoping that we reach critical mass and I can truly ditch reddit.
I had gotten in habit of clearing out my save list to save the links of comments or posts I liked and making sure to do a back up with archive.org, since comments disappearing was an issue before this.
Will do the same for some comments I had made before deleting it all.
Similar at Beehaw. It's going to be interesting to see how it all pans out
Same here, and I agree with you. I think this whole reddit fiasco will cause enough migration to sustain Lemmy and lead to organic growth over time. And I think this is best for Lemmy in the long term.
Agreed. I was never on Digg, but was on reddit for several years before the Great Diaspora. I remember the epic web comics telling the story of how the Digg invasion happened. What some people forget to include in the retelling of those days is that there was not just one, isolated incident that led to Digg's downfall.
Like all mass migrations in human history, there were multiple waves. The last was the biggest, but only because the previous waves had already gone out and created something new for the masses to move on to.
I think this will be similar. We'll see people move back to Reddit in a couple of days, but in July the mobile apps shut down and another wave will likely be generated.
True. People just see this one 48 hour blackout and telling everyone that not that much people will leave reddit. Yeah not that much, if you just see this one incident. We still have the D-Day of 30th June, and subsequent waves if reddit CEOs decided to fuck things further. We just have to wait.
BuzzFeed and other sites might have to write their own content. So many "articles" I come across are just reposts of Reddit comments.
They could always pay the API fees and get ChatGPT to write some Reddit-like comments for them to report on.
Honestly, it wouldn't even surprise me if they did that
I already had to use the cached version of a Reddit thread today to solve a technical issue I had with the rust compiler. There is so much valuable content there that is well indexed by search engines, let's hope they don't lock down the site even further to prevent AI's from training on their data.
Although, in that case, Lemmy can take over as the searchable internet forum.
I wonder if the Internet Archive has preserved much of Reddit's old posts and comments? No one seems to have mentioned it.
I know there were at least a few projects not affiliated with IA that basically was a mirror copy of reddit. No idea what has happened to them at this point have not checked in a long time.
If they actually want to restrict ai training, they also have to restrict search engines. I may be behind the times, but usually those kind of questions have gone to a stack overflow sort of site I would have thought.
If they wanted to restrict AI Training they'll need to prevent AI's ability to view the website. Removing the API just removes the low bandwidth low impact manner of gathering the data. Scripts can just as easily HTTP scrape as they can use an API, but that's a lot more resource intensive on Reddit's side. Heck, this is the whole reason free public APIs became a thing in the first place.
Wait. Why are the memes about the blackout better on twitter than here?! Or have I just not found the good communities for those kind of memes?
There are still a lot more people on twitter.
Good point. I keep forgetting that not everyone just moved here during the protests.
Give it time 😃
You are right, already quite happy about the fediverse, can't wait to see where this goes!
I feel bad about all the people deleting their Reddit accounts because there’s probably so many helpful comments and posts on subreddits people look to for help and info that are just gone now
It would just be better if they transitioned over to another site in protest, but preserved helpful posts and comments
I see where you are coming from, but it's really the only way to protest at the individual level. Reddit's value is the users and mods and the content we create. Destroying that is the best way to not only devalue Reddit's upcoming IPO, but to actually have a chance of getting the current admins to realize they are sowing their own downfall.
I look at this as a lesson for the wider Internet culture. We spent the last decade forgetting that it's about decentralizing and niche communities, not walled gardens controlled by single individuals or companies. That let to some great things, perhaps, but it also means the system was less resilient to change.
I'm hoping that in a few years we will look back and realize that the Fediverse, in all of its many forms and motivations, helped restore a bit of what the original promise of the Internet and the web had. At the very least, I hope to one day see the 2015-2023 era as a low point.
Just deleting the account keeps the comments there, though.
You gotta use one of those wipers to fully nuke your tracks. Otherwise you show as [Deleted] and the posts remain.
We really need a better way to long-term archive stuff like that such that no one person can delete it—some sort of distributed archival system similar to BitTorrent's distributed content downloading but built to be easily searchable by the wider web.
I deleted my comment because I don't want to drive clicks there.
It's sad, but this is entirely on spez.