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The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

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Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#211

Post by aniforprez »

vxNsr wrote: post #158
DirkH wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is stunning to me that Mastadon still hasn't come up with a simple onboarding solution to sidestep the issue of "instances" I completely agree with you. Mastadon even loses techies like me due to the decision fatigue of having to pick instances before I can even start exploring.

What’s shocking is everyone can wrap their heads around regular country post offices, emails, in general distinct entities interacting, but lose their minds when you tell them about mastodon. Just tell them it’s email for twitter. Just like you can interact with anyone who’s email address you know so too with their mastodon handle. The only real difference is that everyone also publishes all their “emails” for anyone…

Oh please. The consolidation has affected email equally to the point where "email" is synonymous to "gmail". No one is signing up for email by searching for other email clients, setting up SMTP and whatnot. They go to Google, search for "email" click on the sign up link to "gmail" and carry on. I hardly believe even more than 1% of email users even know about its federated nature

Unless Mastodon has similarly sensible, no frills defaults, it is doomed to the fringes. Normal users are not going to have the patience to look at a bunch of instances and make a choice that they really don't understand. Make a large instance for everyone and make it the default

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#212

Post by mrtksn »

michaelchisari wrote: post #145
mrtksn wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are now reduced to be a Subreddit. I don't know if anything else was possible, the IT need for communities is about the same and it makes total sense to have those on one place. It solves the infrastructure problem, it solves discoverability problem, it solves the user account management problem and it is all "free". It comes at the cost of fragility, true, but as always convenience is the king.

Maybe the solution isn't decentralization, but a non-profit approach like Wikipedia. Reddit already functions entirely on volunteer labor anyways, adding venture capital requirements makes much less sense than a just-keep-the-lights-on non-profit model.

My thoughts exactly. Without solving the funding issue, we can't have nice things.

Wikipedia so far showed us that it is possible to have a non-profit global platform but maybe other alternatives are possible too.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#213

Post by travisporter »

willio58 wrote: post #173
ajayyy wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did. The mobile app by default signs you up on mastodon.social now

Is this not a centralizing measure? This is where things fundamentally break down for me.

No it’s not in my opinion because it’s a default setting

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#214

Post by capybara_2020 »

willio58 wrote: post #173
ajayyy wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did. The mobile app by default signs you up on mastodon.social now

Is this not a centralizing measure? This is where things fundamentally break down for me.

I am curious, why don't you like centralization? It seems like no matter the crowd, people need centralization. Atleast to begin with, then they are ok breaking off into subgroups. Like what happened with reddit. You start on the popular frontpage. Then the longer you stay, the more subreddits you start using.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#216

Post by toastal »

supernikio2 wrote: post #83
hourago wrote: post #75

The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. The Internet has become fragile. One service goes down and everybody suffers. If the top 10 services went down most people would think that there is no Internet at all. E-Mail is the last s…

It's getting worse by the minute, too. What used to be a subreddit might now be a Discord server, which is in my opinion even worse, keeping solutions/questions to certain issues within Discord's own walls. You now have to enter a server, search for your specific problem, and, if not found, ask someone and wait for them to respond. If results are on the first page of google it's much more friction-less and convenient…

> which is in my opinion even worse

It’s not just your opinion. Discord is a black hole for content. There won’t crawlers for the content in these spaces. I’d like to see more activity in the ActivityPub & modern, self-hosted forum/blog spaces (where Atom feeds can aggregate), but history likes to repeat itself as we move from one closed, proprietary communications service to the next because there’s ‘no cost’ to join.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#217

Post by Avamander »

dabluecaboose wrote: post #81
bufio wrote: post #3

The mainstream web seems to be crumpling under the weight of its enshittification.

Enshittification was already causing reddit to ruin google results. Reddit's new garbage redesign contains other posts from a subreddit in the page. So often times you'll google a term and get a link that looks like exactly the post you want, but it ends up being a different post in the same subreddit, and the one you were looking for was just in the suggested posts for that one. Also, reddit has ruined filtering by…

> Reddit's new garbage redesign contains other posts from a subreddit in the page.

StackOverflow has done that for a while, by linking to related or recent questions (which obviously aren't the same each visit).

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#218

Post by mattlondon »

Do people really find Reddit useful? I usually find lots of "hey guys has anyone got " from 2018 with no solution but a few token "Me too!" Responses, or worse a response but "Never mind - I solved it. "

I skip over most Reddit links in the search because of that sort of thing being 95% of results. I genuinely have not ever found that much useful on it - I can probably count on one hand a time where it has been useful.

Is it just me that thinks Reddit is deeply overrated? Or is there some magic part of Reddit with people who know what they are talking about and who properly answer questions in a timely manner? I've never found it if so. Perhaps I need to have an account to access the best bits? But if so how would Google find it?

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#219

Post by unshavedyak »

frickinLasers wrote: post #189
unshavedyak wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good question. Regardless of Twitter, Kbin and Lemmy (and maybe others?) will be even more important for ensuring they get indexed properly. The organic/real nature of Reddit comments (at least those not astroturfed .. heh) were valuable to search. We (devs) need to make sure Fediverse stuff provides that value. At least in my view. Is there something Mastodon/Kbin/Lemmy might be doing that could cause poor in…

I only know Mastodon: There's a large LGBTQ+ community who don't want to be indexed out of concern for their safety (because, for example, there are small far-right communities on other instances looking to cause mayhem). The ability to be oneself online without worrying about getting brigaded, doxxed, or whatever, is a selling point. Indexing runs counter to that.

Agreed, but is it a choice or a requirement from the software? I love choice, that instances (and users!) can and should get to choose the level of indexing. If it's software wide, not sure i can get behind that. Especially since .. doesn't ActivityPub sort of ruin that? Ie any instance you federate with could expose your data, regardless of Mastodon's rules.

Federated instance data visibility and agreed visibility rules of course come into play. But if i understand this right it would mean you can only federate with instances or software that agrees to your privacy rules. Which is totally viable, but that also then means Mastodon can't federate with, for example, a Reddit clone that wants to be indexed.

It's a complex web of requirements. Definitely something i'll be thinking on as i implement my own ActivityPub instance.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#220

Post by flir »

hourago wrote: post #75

The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. The Internet has become fragile. One service goes down and everybody suffers. If the top 10 services went down most people would think that there is no Internet at all. E-Mail is the last s…

Protocols, not sites.

But there's no profit in that, so I've no idea how we get back to it.

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