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Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

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Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#711

Post by AndrewKemendo »

PM_me_your_math wrote: post #616
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to see some hard data on your claims because this seems cynical to the point of being inaccurate As the creator and moderator of a 100k sub these are the last things on my mind - and same for the other moderators. The whole point of creating and moderating that was because 13 years ago I thought it was the best place to build a community that I wanted to exist. I have no idea if that's true for the moderator…

How does one quantify that? Reddit moderators have a reputation that they themselves created. I'll tell you what, go ahead an post something (comment or topic) that goes against the prevailing group-think in any reddit sub, and you'll experience it for yourself. Record in a spreadsheet, and you'll have your hard data that supports reddit as cancer. As reddit moved away from free speech, and more towards totalitarian…

I’m sorry but the scale that Reddit is at now and the number of subs that have large and thriving communities tells me that moderators aren’t creating some hellscape preventing community from forming.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#712

Post by redundantly »

nullityrofl wrote: post #706
redundantly wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And to be clear: I think the fact that it's decentralized doesn't preclude it from having those other properties that users value And yet: > > Federated services will never become mainstream. This is just the reality that people need to come to accept > > Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons. This is just the reality > > Lemmy is an alternative to…

I'm not all over the place. You're just exactly the frustrating personality type I'm talking about: one who is hyperfixated on the technology and the decentralized nature who can't see the forest for the trees and is more interested in arguing the minutia. I'm content in my belief that we won't see a mass adopted Fediverse technology replace Reddit in my lifetime. I think theres a variety of reasons for this but the…

> You're just exactly the frustrating personality type I'm talking about: one who is hyperfixated on the technology...

If anyone here has been hyper fixated on technology it's you. I haven't been heralding the Fediverse. I haven't been waxing poetic about decentralisation. I've only been responding to the things you've said about how the centralised nature of Reddit is why it's successful and that decentralisation will never successful, which is something you said.

> > Federated services will never become mainstream.

As for this:

> I'm content in my belief that we won't see a mass adopted Fediverse technology replace Reddit in my lifetime. I think theres a variety of reasons for this but the people involved in the development and advocacy of the products and their inability to listen to any feedback are the biggest one. They think they've got this _allllll_ figured out and it's just humanity that needs to evolve to meet them.

It's not like those products can't evolve. The developers and communities behind these products can, and most likely will, do things to help with adoption of the services they've created. This isn't like the book of Genesis. Just like how some deity didn't create the earth in six days and then rested it's not like new features won't be added or different federated offerings won't appear.

> I'll come back here and apologise if I'm wrong. I don't see that happening, though.

Nah, that's okay. It's just a chat on a web forum. I imagine we'll both forget about it in a few days.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#713

Post by nullityrofl »

redundantly wrote: post #712
nullityrofl wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not all over the place. You're just exactly the frustrating personality type I'm talking about: one who is hyperfixated on the technology and the decentralized nature who can't see the forest for the trees and is more interested in arguing the minutia. I'm content in my belief that we won't see a mass adopted Fediverse technology replace Reddit in my lifetime. I think theres a variety of reasons for this but the…

> You're just exactly the frustrating personality type I'm talking about: one who is hyperfixated on the technology... If anyone here has been hyper fixated on technology it's you. I haven't been heralding the Fediverse. I haven't been waxing poetic about decentralisation. I've only been responding to the things you've said about how the centralised nature of Reddit is why it's successful and that decentralisation wi…

> It's not like those products can't evolve. The developers and communities behind these products can, and most likely will, do things to help with adoption of the services they've created. This isn't like the book of Genesis. Just like how some deity didn't create the earth in six days and then rested it's not like new features won't be added or different federated offerings won't appear.

The _entire_ point of my first post was my finishing sentence:

> I wish people would focus on building services that meet peoples needs and not just as an expression of their ideologies.

Put more plainly: these services have been around for a decade (diaspora* was a viable alternative to Digg before Reddit) without meaningful adoption _or_ evolution in spite of that lack of adoption. I surmise it's because the folks developing them are more interested in the ideologies than building communities.

Obviously they can change. Obviously they can become a better fit with a bigger focus on UX. But they haven't in the last decade and I'm not seeing any indication they will this one, either.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#714

Post by cpncrunch »

throw16180339 wrote: post #663
cpncrunch wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately it seems that most of the reddit users/subs participating in this "strike" aren't interested in the facts. I see /r/science says it is private due to accessibility changes and it links to a Verge article, but the Verge article actually says that accessibility apps are exempted.

Many of the facts aren't reported in the Verge article. Last month Reddit cut off the Pushshift API ( https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat... ). It was widely used by moderation bots such as AssistantBOT. Pushshift will supposedly be restored ( https://www.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/13w6j20/advancin... ), but access must be approved by Reddit and is only open to mods with a Pushshift acco…

I had a look at saferbot, but it doesn't seem like a good solution. In all the examples given the problematic subreddit was eventually banned by reddit. It just never makes sense to ban people for posting on a subreddit, because they could be disagreeing with it. The only time things like that are useful is if you ban all the people who like a post, but reddit doesn't give that capability.

It sounds like that trans sub just needs to farm out some of the moderator tasks rather than one person doing it all. If they have that many subscribers then they presumably have a lot of people who can help moderate.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#715

Post by Arathorn »

drdaeman wrote: post #708
paulmd wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> thanks, my Matrix Synapse server is bad enough OT but what pains did you experience with matrix / what would you have done differently? this'd make a good blog post/HN article at this moment imo.

I would've explored alternative servers. The issue with Synapse is the same as I currently have with Lemmy - lack of HA. One particular machine goes down and the system is 100% unavailable. And most of my machines are hardware I own, located at homes (mine, parents, etc) in different countries, so they're slightly more prone to random power or uplink outages than AWS' us-east-1. Hobbyist-grade geo-distributed cluster…

Solving active/backup HA for Matrix is pretty straightforward: postgres replication for the db and a shared filesystem for the media repo. When the primary postgres+synapse goes down, promote the secondary to primary, and continue.

We’re also working on account portability (MSC4014) that would eventually support active/active at the matrix layer, but it’s not ready tet.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#716

Post by _djo_ »

seydor wrote: post #659
idiotsecant wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're saying here sounds to me like "I think the current moderators are bad, get rid of them all and get new ones who will be much better" I have some ...doubts about how well something like this would work in practice. Burning large systems down and starting over is generally not more efficient than tweaking the system you have.

Governments are burnt down every four years

They’re not. The political leaders at the top are, but the civil servants who actually keep the lights on and everything running stick around from administration to administration.

We’ve learnt a lot about the necessity for institutional knowledge and continuation over the years.

Reddit with a whole new set of mods will be a worse experience overall. The largest and most general subs will probably be alright but good luck finding mods for the more focused and specialist subs.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#717

Post by rakoo »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #607
rakoo wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> benefit from the product and gain an incentive > An infintessimal fraction of users care about philosophy or architecture [...] Users came for their cat pics. Give them their cat pics. Pitch them on the back end afterwards. I'm afraid you don't understand the concept of the fediverse. The philosophy is the point. Making reddit2 is completely useless. This is not a product, it's a vision of how we manage communicati…

> philosophy is the point. Making reddit2 is completely useless. This is not a product, it's a vision of how we manage communications as a society. Nothing about cleaner onboarding requires anyone to compromise principles. And nothing about a guiding philosophy requires you constantly evangelize. Let the merits of the system speak for itself. > implies involvement, because in a democracy you are part of the decision…

For a more precise background* I don't believe a representative democracy, where we must abandon all power to someone else who we hepe will do the right thing is a model we should be pursuing. Polls are not a good thing per se, they're only better than the worse methods.

What happens here is that we have the occasion to take control of our community gatherings. How do you take control if you don't even know what you're talking about ? How can you discuss the form of society we're building if you don't want to discuss and be told how to think ?

Now, I understand that what I'm asking for is out of the norms, because we're not used to decide collectively and run our own lives, the entirety of our education and our lives happens with someone else taking decisions for us. It's comfortable, we don't need to think too much, especially when we agree with the decisions. Here is the occasion to do it differently. Why not do it ? And if picking an instance is too hard, why not pick a random one ? We want to have the best thing for us individually, but we want to be told what it is. We want to not be subjects to the whims of the owner of a platform, but we don't want to understand where we're setting foot and prefer a generic instance that will be for everyone. Hust lite reddit, but different. That's not building, that's consuming, and if you're only there to consume, do you really want a democracy ? It sounds like a benevolent dictatorship is better.

In short, I don't believe actual democracy can happen without understanding the situation.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#718

Post by codetrotter »

jtode wrote: post #455
codetrotter wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a viable, popular alternative Popular? No. Viable? Yes. Try https://zapad.nstr.no/ it’s my instance. If even a handful of people would join I think that would be nice.

Since you've got insight into operating, can you clarify for me: Does federation happen at the community level? So for instance, using reddit terminology, if I subscribe to r/gardening on your instance, do I get the same thing as everyone else gets in r/gardening on all the instances you federate with? I'm clear on federation in general but not how it works for link aggregation. I've been reddit-free for about a year…

The communities you see on my instance so far are communities that have been created on that instance specifically.

So https://zapad.nstr.no/c/rust is distinct from for example https://programming.dev/c/rust

I have added some other instances to my list of allowed instances and these are now showing up as linked instances in https://zapad.nstr.no/instances

I have seen other people leave comments on posts across instances but I have not yet figured out how I can use my user on my instance to leave a comment on another instance

According to https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/federation_get... whole communities are able to federate as well. But I have not yet understood how this works, heh.

Edit: Same page has some more details:

> One way you can take advantage of federation is by opening a different instance, like ds9.lemmy.ml, and browsing it. If you see an interesting community, post or user that you want to interact with, just copy its URL and paste it into the search of your own instance. Your instance will connect to the other one (assuming the allowlist/blocklist allows it), and directly display the remote content to you, so that you can follow a community or comment on a post. Here are some examples of working searches

> !main@lemmy.ml (Community)

> @nutomic@lemmy.ml (User)

> https://lemmy.ml/c/programming (Community)

> https://lemmy.ml/u/nutomic (User)

> https://lemmy.ml/post/123 (Post)

> https://lemmy.ml/comment/321 (Comment)

and

> If you search for a community first time, 20 posts are fetched initially. Only if a least one user on your instance subscribes to the remote community, will the community send updates to your instance. Updates include:

> New posts, comments

> Votes

> Post, comment edits and deletions

> Mod actions

> You can copy the URL of the community from the address bar in your browser and insert it in your search field. Wait a few seconds, the post will appear below. At the moment there is no loading indicator for the search, so wait a few seconds if it shows "no results".

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#719

Post by rakoo »

fnovd wrote: post #591
rakoo wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> benefit from the product and gain an incentive > An infintessimal fraction of users care about philosophy or architecture [...] Users came for their cat pics. Give them their cat pics. Pitch them on the back end afterwards. I'm afraid you don't understand the concept of the fediverse. The philosophy is the point. Making reddit2 is completely useless. This is not a product, it's a vision of how we manage communicati…

If the philosophy is the point, it's a dead platform. Utopian ideals are fine, if that's your thing. Shaming people who don't share them is just rude. I don't see how you can compare the platform to the democratic process and not expect the same warts you see in democracies. A few people care a lot, some people care a bit, most people barely care at all. Grandstanding will never change that.

I've said it in a sibling post, but I don't believe our political systems are perfect models of democracy but are closer to benevolent dictatorships. It's comfortable, but that's not xhat the fediverse is about. There are plenty of centralized platforms with exactly the same problems as reddit, the fediverse is about building something else.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#720

Post by codetrotter »

codetrotter wrote: post #718
jtode wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you've got insight into operating, can you clarify for me: Does federation happen at the community level? So for instance, using reddit terminology, if I subscribe to r/gardening on your instance, do I get the same thing as everyone else gets in r/gardening on all the instances you federate with? I'm clear on federation in general but not how it works for link aggregation. I've been reddit-free for about a year…

The communities you see on my instance so far are communities that have been created on that instance specifically. So https://zapad.nstr.no/c/rust is distinct from for example https://programming.dev/c/rust I have added some other instances to my list of allowed instances and these are now showing up as linked instances in https://zapad.nstr.no/instances I have seen other people leave comments on posts across instan…

So now I tried this and it works

Here you can see a post from a different instance, shown on my instance:

https://zapad.nstr.no/post/42

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