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Reddit communities with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I would be cautious too if I were a sub owner and guiding people to an alternative honestly. Lemmy and Kbin both are relatively unstable right now, even if they are pretty good. Waiting a little to see which instances are more stable and likely to last is a good move before planting people somewhere and making an official replacement sub.
That and there is some rapid development for the apps going on right now. Lemmy definitely still needs some UI improvements and has a bunch of little problems which could turn away new users prematurely. So it would be good if there was some advertisement in July when the reddit apps shut down.
Fittingly I had two rewrite this comment and another comment 10 minutes ago because I got errors when trying to send them..
This is the main issue I see right now as well. I created my own instance for my account to live on, just so I know it will be there as long as I want it to. But that doesn't do anything for communities I'm subscribed to that could, potentially, be on an instance that later goes down.
I think communities of similar topics are going to need to coordinate in the long run, and perhaps run their own instance to house their communities. This way the folks running the community and the folks hosting it are one in the same. You'd have instances that mainly house users, and perhaps a community or two. That's where most folks would have their main account. Then you'd have instances that mainly house content, with few users besides the moderation/admin team(s).
I think what would help is the introduction of multisubreddit equivalent for lemmy and then allowing similar duplicate communities to have the option of linking up with each other so people can subscribe to public multisubreddit. So regardless of what instance a community is on if it's like a technology community it'll display all the technology community duplicates.
That is brilliant. A sort of sub-federation within the grander federated instances. Subfeds (you heard it here first!) could feed off of and into each other, so if one instance goes dark it’s community and content are not lost as they’ve been replicated across the Fediverse. Sort of a cross between multisubs and RAID.
Dude what a great idea I hope that's on a roadmap
How about extending the software so that communities replicate between sets of servers over time? That way, things are more robust even if one server goes down.
I am gonna be honest but instances going down and losing communities could have the same probability as Reddit shutting down Subreddits just because they feel like it.
I understand your concern, but I think it would first be wise to let some communities flourish and look how it holds up in the grand scheme of things.
I mean...Reddit was taken offline by subs going private, and they had forewarning this was going to happen. Lemmy is handling a veritable monsoon of new users
This will be like the YT changes in 2017 only much sharper. The utility of reddit is already dead. The whole point in all of this is to be another mindless zombie platform. The native app and nu(ked) reddit were already like this. Now you won't be able to search and find anything anywhere on the internet unless you are escorted there by an algorithm.
Eh, this was already the case on Reddit to an extent, but the point is moderators really carried the platform on their backs and if many of them really do leave then Reddit will collapse as a useful platform with actual discussion.
Reddit without niche subs would probably become a aggregate for tiktok, Instagram, and Twitter videos. Which it has been trending towards when it comes to what reddit displays to users as default.
Speaking of: Remember when YouTube was good? When your feed showed you your actual subscriptions, the earlier algorithm was showing you stuff you actually want to see and not 6 late night shows, an ad for YouTube TV, and maybe a decent video essay or two?