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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

#721

Post by drdaeman »

Arathorn wrote: post #715
drdaeman wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks!

PostgreSQL replication is hard for me. I know how to set up "classic" replication, but automatic failover and recovery that can solve split-brain issues is, sadly, not something I've figured out. And if it's not the machine, but the network that goes down (which happens few times a year on consumer-grade connections), it's a problem that happens in practice. I have learned how to repair nodes by hand, but I don't want to do this.

So far, I've managed to avoid thinking much of it by using distributed databases (CockroachDB and Consul, in particular) that already have all the magic built-in, so I just have to be careful with the settings.

Maybe I just need to learn how to deal with PostgreSQL...

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

#722

Post by rakoo »

kelnos wrote: post #671
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 all you care about is the philosophy, then you're going to fail. Most people only care about the end product, the end experience. And unfortunately you still need those people (to some extent) since these sorts of things require some kind of critical mass to be successful.

Fail at what exactly ? What are your criterias for success ? If it's something like eternal growth ana scalability, I would consider that a failure. My criteria is if everyone has access to the people they care about, in conditions they control. Commercial success is not for me.

> Most people only care about the end product, the end experience.

Because that's what we keep telling them: don't think, let me take care of this, CEO knows better. That is how we arrive at this crooked situation where sharholders come first, business partners second, and users last.

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

#723

Post by hanniabu »

iza wrote: post #258
hanniabu wrote: post #87

I've put together a comparison of Reddit alternatives if anybody is interested: https://gist.github.com/hanniabu/6f96c6e820d58d8736f3c15d4c0... There's also some notes above the linked table

Isn't Raddle open source? The footer links to https://postmill.xyz/ https://raddle.me/wiki/why_raddle

Oh interesting, I completely missed this. I saw the footer link I thought it was just to the company that runs it.

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

#724

Post by isykt »

HWR_14 wrote: post #649
isykt wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not clear there’s anything “unique” about the set of users that both generate the content and will leave the site because of the API changes. From an investor standpoint, content is content and monetizeable users are monetizable users. Both are replaceable, and it’s better to have monetizable users that generate content than non-monentizeable users who generate content.

Most mods (who oversee the generation of new content) use the API because third-party apps offer superior mod tools. Instead of thinking about "shutting down third party apps" think about it as "asking your volunteer labor to do the job on hard mode". You can see why those people might get pissed off.

I understand why they’re pissed off, it’s just not clear to me that they are irreplaceable. Lots of people here are talking about their favorite niche subreddit but is that really where the value is derived, advertising wise? I doubt it. I’m fairly certain that the top 25 or so subreddits drive most of the revenue, and they have no dearth of people willing to mod them. Hell, if Reddit Inc just in-housed moderation of the the top 100 subs they’d probably be fine.

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

#725

Post by ablatner »

joemi wrote: post #693
COGlory wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a feature. Besides, everyone knows how on reddit, joining one sub can result in auto-bans from other subs. How is this any different?

I didn't know that. And I've been on reddit for at least a decade. What are you talking about?

Subs that are supposed to be safe spaces sometimes auto-ban users that post in subs known for bigotry.

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

#726

Post by rakoo »

FormerBandmate wrote: post #654
pauby wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's assuming the goal is to get to 'mass market'. Lemmy existed before the Reddit exodus. It will exist when they all go back.

In that case, why even bring up Lemmy as a Reddit alternative? It just serves to attract people who won’t be good users and waste their time

Lemmy has the same functionality, and allows people to both control their own conditions and talk to anyone. That's the reason this whole ruckus is happening. Centralized alternatives don't have that. I don't know who said lemmy is an alternative to reddit, because just like mastodon/twitter, it's not. Or rather, not so simple.

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

#727

Post by anigbrowl »

brewdad wrote: post #656
anigbrowl wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 'being improved' even though it's been identified as a problem from the outset of the fediverse, nearly a decade ago. I don't know how to make this any simpler: Forced choices drive away users. People don't like making decisions without context because they feel like scams. That's why uptake is slow almost a decade into federation. The UX model is bad.

Picking a user name is a forced choice. By your logic, nobody would ever want to join a social media platform that didn't automatically assign a user name.

Asinine argument. Everyone already gets the concept of a name because they already have one. No such principle guides the selection of a server.

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

#728

Post by tomstockmail »

traverseda wrote: post #260
chongli wrote: post #37

I was really skeptical of lemmy [1] when I first heard about it during the blackout. I joined yesterday and it completely changed my mind. Yes, it is going to face some growing pains (see the total user growth in the past few days) [2] in the coming weeks and months but it really has the potential to replace Reddit with a federated system of communities. One that won't be damaged by investors or executives attempting…

I'm the head mod of a pretty big subreddit, /r/3Dprinting, with 7 million views a month and 1.8 million subscribers. At the beginning of this I set up a lemmy instance at https://rhombik.com and linked to it from that subreddit. From the roughly 150k uniques per day we had on /r/3Dprinting zero of them have tried the lemmy instance. So make of that what you will.

@dang this website is being trolled and full of balls, not 3d printed either

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

#729

Post by rakoo »

Nextgrid wrote: post #531
chongli wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Joe Blow consumer just wants access to all the amazing free content on Reddit. Unfortunately, the people who create that content (1% of users) are currently getting screwed over by Reddit. So my appeal to join lemmy is not aimed at Joe Blow, it’s aimed at the actual contributors who make communities possible. If enough of them switch over then lemmy will gain critical mass, and the rest is history. Joe Blow can…

> it’s aimed at the actual contributors who make communities possible Contributors generally create content because they want it to be seen by more than a handful of nerds and don't want it to disappear within weeks because their instance has ran out of money. Those contributors will either stop contributing for good, go back to Reddit (because it's still a better experience than any of the "fediverse" bullshit) or j…

Look at the history of Mastodon. Contributors come in all shapes, but all of them want to be able to create without being harassed, insulted, mocked, trolled. Control over your means of communication is a mandatory step for that. Yes, your audience will be few. But few people listening to you in a wholesome way is miles better than masses barely seeing you, harassing you and overall not being heard. There's always someone who'll compare their audience on the fediverse vs twitter, and the conclusion remains: quality is better than quantity.

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

#730

Post by rakoo »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #313
ZunarJ5 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing new for the Fediverse. It'll stabilise.

This seems like it could be solved by shifting the federation to the client. Let me choose which servers to subscribe to, and let my client merge comment threads when the same story is posted to multiple servers. And let me choose a mod team to filter stories and comments for me. If the fediverse is like email, then filtering should happen on the client. It's not like I expect gmail to "defederate" an email server th…

Here's an even better version: all servers exchange everything, it's all text, properly managed the synchronization is efficient. Clients list topics and get full threaas with the assurance they have everything. Mods decide whether your story/comment respects the rules before allowing the post.

Boom, you have just reinvented usenet.

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