This is great, many more subreddits should do something like this. But in the end, it’s us, the end users, who should do the actual protesting since it’s us who have the power to change things. I’ve decided not to give them any kind of traffic from now on. Me, by myself, won’t make much impact but if more of us did the same they’d be force to change their strategy.
Subreddits doing this will have a much bigger impact than end users, because large masses of people will never do anything inconvenient on their own. This is the reason why capitalism doesn’t self-regulate for better environmental standards, for an example. The whole personal carbon footprint thing was invented by an oil company to shame individuals so we can blame eachother for our consumption instead of regulating energy companies. Nothing changes if we rely on everyone to do the right thing without any external motivations (be it environmental regulations or closing subreddits).
That’s not to say you shouldn’t also look at your own actions - personally I deleted Apollo on my phone and blocked the reddit domains on my work laptop and home network. But big players (I.e big subreddits) need to be part of the change.
This is a great video on the carbon footprint campaign:
Lol I can’t wait till this is national news, right before they go for their IPO.
The loss of the forum like help threads will probably be the most impactful thing. We can build communities elsewhere, but the 8 years old post about a problem only you and the OP is having is super valuable.
There was talk of someone populating a Lemmy instance with reddit data.
There is a lot of reddit data on a torrent somewhere aparrently.
I feel that. I posted about a Plex problem 2 years ago and the subsequent solution I worked out. Every once in a while I still get someone replying to that and thanking me.
I’d like to add a comment here just to add some visibility:
If you have an uncapped/unlimited internet connection, you should seriously consider running the Archive Team Warrior
They’re heavily involved in scraping and archiving data from all over the internet (and, recently, most/all of Reddit) so that it’s preserved, regardless of what happens to the underlying platform.
I run it on my home server in docker, but they have a lot of options for doing so and it basically requires just running it, and then forgetting it exists.
My hope is that things like Chat GPT can now become that source. I can only assume all those historical posts were used as training data.
ChatGPT doesn’t understand the things it says. It shouldn’t be treated as a source of truth. It can be tripped up by nuance, or by statements which require an understanding of the concept of syntax. For example, if you ask it what is the longest 5-letter word, it will confidently give you an answer.
I am so happy to see people coming together and moving away from commercial platforms. It feels silly to say it, but it seems like it is a step in the right direction. It is technological and social progress. Decentralization is a really fantastic tool and it seems to be a system that cannot be controlled internally or externally. Mastodon has been great, and I expect Lemmy to be even better.
To anyone reading, if you have any extra cash, look into making a small donation to your instance. The people running it are not just putting in time, they are likely paying hundreds a month to rent server space.
Money is going to be the deciding factor in the long-term health of the entire Fediverse. More users on each instance means more costs – and to some extent, even users not on that instance will contribute to cost. That money has to come from somewhere, and eventually, if the Fediverse is going to scale up to even a sizable portion of what we’re moving away from, we need real, consistent money involved. It doesn’t have to be full VC corpo junk, but eventually, some instances are going to need a team.
I want this stuff to work great, but expecting the people running it to pay the cost forever isn’t sustainable.
People are usually more willing to spend some money on community projects such as an instance they like. This could be a financially viable way to fund online platforms like Lemmy.
Donations are not consistent, that’s the big trouble. Especially after a big exodus, people may move, and they may donate for a while, but those donations will typically drop off eventually, even if they keep using it.
You’re right that people are usually more willing to spend on community projects, and that’s largely true - but watching open-source software as long as I have, I know that donations rarely cover things in the long-term, and most of the projects that are funded well enough to have a team behind them are actually funded by corporations. Heck, even getting one person able to run an instance as a full time gig is going to be difficult without it turning corporate.
Yeah, consistency is a problem. Perhaps we should implement some sort of Lemmy Coin solution that would allow people to show their appreciation to quality posts and support the instance at the same time.
Federation frustrates that, as well – for cross-instance posts, what’s the split? 50/50? What if one instance is charging $1 per coin, but another is $0.50 per coin, what price becomes paid? How will you even ensure that the split can occur reliably? Heck, how will you handle trying to do that transfer internationally?
I know I’m probably coming across as a downer, but without answering these questions, we don’t have a solution, we just have a patchwork of ideas that people worked on and implemented without every providing anything useful. I want this to succeed, desperately. I’m tired of corporate interests ruining everything – but we can’t succeed at this without figuring out these long-term issues.
Hmm… Those are valid points.
I can’t come up with anything brilliant, so I’ll just give you my mediocre idea instead. Let’s say there’s an “award foundation“ where you can buy “Lemmy gold” and other awards for a fixed piece. When you find a post worthy of the award, the value is spread among everyone involved. One third to your instance, one third to the instance of the recipient of the award and one third to the instance where the conversion was had.
They could add the sites as brave creators and get some revenue from that.Its depends on the number of users but anything helps
Unfortunately, the way federation works means that a 100 user instance that never grows past that can still see cost increases from the ecosystem growing. The number of network effects involved in all of this makes planning for meaningful sustainability a lot more difficult.
The Reddit community from which
!196@lemmy.blahaj.zone is an offshoot from does this.They went dark indefinitely (until (or if) the API changes are cancelled/undone.
I like the “indefinite” part. Let it stay dark forever and have people make iphone subs in the lemmyverse. The Reddit is dead, long live the Lemmy!
Anything short of indefinite is just a virtue signal, imo.
It’s a shame promoting Lemmy isn’t part of the blackout
I’ve been promoting Lemmy for the past few days and have gotten my comments removed and downvoted by people claiming that Lemmy was a far left recruiting ground for domestic terrorism lmao
I know, right?
I’m an INTERNATIONAL terrorist, thank you very much.
I’m not about to destroy my OWN country… my government at least does THAT for me!
😄
It’s been attempted in various spots, but either reddit itself removes the mentions or edits them out
They delete comments referencing lemmy
Yeah the fact that they actually banned the kbinmigration subreddit is absolutely WILD to me. I made a comment on a post a couple of weeks ago now about how this wouldn’t change anything, and a few people would leave like the last time they did something that made people upset, but most people would stay. After the ama and everything last week though I’ve completely changed my mind, I was wrong.
Is that really something that’s been happening?
My comment just got downvoted, but it’s still there (and has reactions of other migratees to lemmy, so not invisible).
deleted by creator
!iphone@lemmy.ml is one offspring
I’m worried that all the new large communities are hosted at a single instance, lemmy.ml
