this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023

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Reddit down amid major protest (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by NEWS@lemmy.world to c/news@beehaw.org

138 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Reddit has stopped working for millions of users around the world.

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/reddit-down-subreddits-protest-not-working-b2356013.html

The mass outage comes amid a major boycott from thousands of the site’s administrators, who are protessting new changes to the platform.

On 12 June, popular sub-Reddits like r/videos and r/bestof went dark in retaliation to proposed API (Application Programming Interface) charges for third-party app developers.

Among the apps impacted by the new pricing is popular iOS app Apollo, which announced last week that it was unable to afford the new costs and would be shutting down.

Apollo CEO Christian Selig claimed that Reddit would charge up to $20 million per year in order to operate, prompting the mass protest from Reddit communities.

In a Q&A session on Reddit on Friday, the site’s CEO Steve Huffman defended the new pricing.

“Some apps such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync have decided this pricing doesn’t work for their businesses and will close before pricing goes into effect,” said Mr Huffman, who goes by the Reddit username u/spez.

“For the other apps, we will continue talking. We acknowledge that the timeline we gave was tight; we are happy to engage with folks who want to work with us.”

In response to the latest outage, one Reddit user wrote on Twitter: “Spez, YOU broke Reddit.”

Website health monitor DownDetector registered more than 7,000 outage reports for Reddit on Monday.

Some users were greeted with the message: “Something went wrong. Just don’t panic.”

Others received an error warning that stated: “Our CDN [content delivery network] was unable to reach our servers.”

Update: Seems to be resolved for most users

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[–] Scribbd@feddit.nl 74 points 1 year ago

Best thing I read so far about this:

The official Reddit API goes dark in solidarity with current protests.

[–] CoachDom@lemmy.blahaj.zone 52 points 1 year ago (8 children)

It's such a shame - I used Reddit for many years and found so many helpful people that helped me with many things - fixing my motorbike, improving my 3D prints or saving my plants. I hope we can establish similar kind of community in the Fediverse.

I guess that's what we get for trusting too much in a company - decentralised open source software is way to go. Even if somebody in this particular instance will go fucking insane and will decide to raise it to the ground, whatever, the project lives on and you can just go somewhere else.

[–] WatTyler@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's the thing this last week has made me realize: it's so unjust that the 'owners' of Reddit are completely unable to see that the only value they have is what the community provides. Their sense of entitlement, when it is us who are responsible for their $X hundred-million valuation is startling.

[–] mcc@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No they see it, and I can see how they have to make money to support their operations. Lemmy will have similar problems and we will have to pitch in. Bu that's fine, let's talk and let's figure something out. You don't just shut the door and command people to pay up.

[–] WatTyler@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 1 year ago

That's the point I'm making. I would have been 100% behind justified pricing changes to maintain the site. But like you said, that's never what that was.

[–] fossilesque@mander.xyz 12 points 1 year ago

!houseplants@mander.xyz !3dprinting@lemmy.ml
!3dprinting@lemmy.world

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[–] Clbull@beehaw.org 47 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Beehaw is getting hammered with traffic and is really slow today. I wonder if there's been a mass exodus to Lemmy...

[–] ManMade91@midwest.social 34 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I just joined lemmy today. I like it so far. A little rough around the edges, but seems to have potential.

[–] araquen@beehaw.org 40 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Think of the “Lemmyverse” as the ground floor in relation to your Reddit experiences. Like a new MMO when comparing with the maturity of WoW. Some things will feel a little awkward for not having the polish, but there are other mechanics that are new and engaging. The more people who engage on Lemmy, Beehaw, et. al., and the longer the engagement, the better the experience will get. I think of it more like a diamond in the rough, instead of it being a “lesser” version of Reddit.

The difference here is that your investment (of your time) can’t be undercut by a greedy CEO. A fediverse is “self healing.” It’s like setting up a mesh - one node could go bad but the network itself will survive.

[–] Manticore@beehaw.org 26 points 1 year ago (20 children)

This is why I'm hoping Lemmy can resist against some of the Reddit-specific culture that I think would dampen the experience here. Animosity towards emojis, creating echo-chamber communities/subreddits, the air of smug self-righteousness, discussion as something one can 'win' etc.

Redditors in general aren't bad, but a lot of vocal users had it in their heads that they were somehow better than people who used other platforms, and staked lines to maintain that cultural divide. Some of them concluded they were better than other redditors; turning communities into Us vs Them tribalism, until they would fracture into r/subreddit and r/truesubreddit.

Lemmy is not Reddit. It had a culture and it had users before the API shuffle; it's an opportunity to start fresh. It's not appropriate to expect Lemmy turn into Reddit, with all the unpleasantness that entails, and at the expense of the lemmings that were already here.

I'm quite honest about it; I spent years on Reddit too. I'm a redditor. But being here on Lemmy has been such a wonderful breath of fresh air, the 'I disagree but I'll respectfully explain why' that Reddit was missing for years. I can feel how miserable modern Reddit is in comparison and I really hope we don't recreate it.

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[–] SaucyGoodness@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's a bit hard to subscribe to different instances if you're on a separate server etc. I hope it gets easier. Once you're subscribed though, it feels like reddit pretty much. Just hope the saints that post content start using Lemmy.

[–] araquen@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, it is a bit of a challenge. What I did was go to here: https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/4331 and find a community that I had as a subreddit. In the upper right corner, there is a blue dialog box and at the bottom there is an identifier. You copy that identifier, then go to your home server, go to search and paste that identifier. One of the search results should be that server, and you can then just hit “subscribe.”

It’s the same with Mastodon.

That said, if your server shows a listing of Communities, you might be able to subscribe from that list. Beehaw offers that.

[–] CaptainBlagbird@lemmy.one 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It would be really useful if you could set your home instance and then have a direct link for adding/joining the communities that way. It's still quite annoying to do all manually.

Or that all (subscribed?) servers automatically be notified and thus updated when a new community is created on another server.

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[–] 1993_toyota_camry@beehaw.org 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Beehaw is getting hammered with traffic and is really slow today.

They've really turned it around over the past few hours though. Fast as hell now.

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[–] songblues99@lemmy.fmhy.ml 20 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I'll admit, I'm part of that exodus.

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[–] treebeard@beehaw.org 15 points 1 year ago

I've been watching the stats since the blackout announcement. According to the Lemmy page on the federation info stats site, Lemmy gained about 10,000 users just last night.

[–] Variden3301@lemm.ee 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hello I am a reddit refugee. And I am happy to find open source alternatives to things I use. Thanks to all the devs here!!!

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[–] DRx@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

I’ve tried 10ish alts today… Lemmy so far has my vote for best alt, others probably feel the same

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[–] knighthawk0811@lemmy.one 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the servers don't know what to do when ads outnumber content 36 to 1

[–] 666dollarfootlong@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They celebrate, of course

[–] heartlessevil@lemmy.one 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

I'm curious about why the most popular subreddits going private would stress out their servers. Wouldn't that reduce load?

They might be getting DDoSed.

Another possibility is that many of the closed subreddits link to a single thread in Save3rdpartyapps for an explanation. That page was returning gateway timeouts over the last few days. Since it has tens of thousands of comments, the sorting algorithm might be timing out from people visiting that particular page.

[–] Ropianos@feddit.de 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would guess it's related to making all the content of the subs private. For large subs that would mean crawling millions of posts/comments.

[–] heartlessevil@lemmy.one 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It doesn't need to update every individual link or comment, the "private" property is just on the subreddit itself. There is probably an index on the "private" property so filtering on that property is cheap.

Sources:

https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/models/subreddit.py#L297 (subreddit model)
https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/models/link.py (post model - privacy is absent)

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[–] lowleveldata@programming.dev 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can't have a black out if the site is not online points to temple

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[–] ghostalmedia@beehaw.org 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I wonder what is going to happen on Lemmy when we don't have reddit stories to rant about

[–] Garrathian@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It'll normalize a bit and you'll start seeing more diverse content. Some will quit reddit cold turkey, some will do what i do and hop back and forth, some will just go back and deal. I like it here though so im sticking around at least

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[–] McBinary@midwest.social 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's gonna take a bit. Most are actually 'grieving' a loss right now, and just want to talk about it.

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[–] camelCaseGuy@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago

I'm still incredibly surprised that by taking closing communities you get your servers down. Usually it should be the other way around, but god dammit they screwed that infra somehow, somewhere.

[–] SacredHeartAttack@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago

this is the "and find out" stage

[–] deo@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

"What we had today wasn't a complete drop in traffic, engagement, and a resulting significant downturn in the number of served ads, caused by the major boycott we're in the middle of, guys, that was just a major outage. We still have great expectations for the IPO."

-- spez, probably

[–] Grossly_incandescent@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Slowly tweaking his nipples as he says it

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[–] kickinitlegit@lemmy.one 13 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Makes me wonder if it's on purpose to hide the blackout...

[–] pieceofcrazy@feddit.it 8 points 1 year ago

Sure looks like it. It's probably better for their image to be down than to have users refreshing and not seeing new content

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[–] Grenfur@lemmy.one 11 points 1 year ago

Reddit has entered the "Fuck round and find out" portion of their journey.

[–] Variden3301@lemm.ee 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I burned down Memes of the dank and I moved here. Best thing that I did

[–] nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The blackout is pretty dang short though, inconsequential I reckon

[–] MorksEgg@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Not all subreddits are following the 2 day blackout rule. Some have gone private indefinitely and others are going dark until they think matters are being addressed reasonably.

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[–] fuser@quex.cc 10 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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[–] terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.li 10 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I wonder if this is coincidental, or if some people are taking it upon themselves to DDoS them or something. I hope it is the former as that would be absolutely hilarious, and can't be used as further justification for their continuing BS.

[–] EvilColeslaw@beehaw.org 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

So. One thing I've noticed is that privated subs on mobile return an error (403 forbidden). I can't help but wonder if they have a crush of mobile users hammering the API over and trying to refresh their favorite sub because they can't see the message explaining that it's been privated.

[–] Cube6392@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago

Hahaha what a bunch of incompetent boobs making decisions over there leading Reddit as a company

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[–] MorksEgg@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Seems that the past couple of days some subreddits have been removing links that suggest migration to any alternatives such as Lemmy, Kbin and Mastadon. Hopefully the exodus continues!!!!

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[–] MrMcNamerica@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

Lol and, I cannot stress this enough, lmao.

[–] flibbertigibbet@feddit.de 8 points 1 year ago

I would be hilarious if this were their shitty app ddosing their servers, because they drove all the subreddits away.

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