Agreed. I was never on Digg, but was on reddit for several years before the Great Diaspora. I remember the epic web comics telling the story of how the Digg invasion happened. What some people forget to include in the retelling of those days is that there was not just one, isolated incident that led to Digg’s downfall.

Like all mass migrations in human history, there were multiple waves. The last was the biggest, but only because the previous waves had already gone out and created something new for the masses to move on to.

I think this will be similar. We’ll see people move back to Reddit in a couple of days, but in July the mobile apps shut down and another wave will likely be generated.

I see where you are coming from, but it’s really the only way to protest at the individual level. Reddit’s value is the users and mods and the content we create.

I look at this as a lesson for the wider Internet culture. We spent the last decade forgetting that it’s about decentralizing and niche communities, not walled gardens controlled by single individuals or companies. That let to some great things, perhaps, but it also means the system was less resilient to change.

I’m hoping that in a few years we will look back and realize that the Fediverse, in all of its many forms and motivations, helped restore a bit of what the original promise of the Internet and the web had. At the very least, I hope to one day see the 2015-2023 era as a low point.

It’s working, too. The Forbes article which I saw posted either here or on Kbin didn’t even push back on Huffman’s claim that traffic from LLMs was the reason for the price hike, and I haven’t seen any big publication use the audio or transcripts showing a slam-dunk case of slander (or libel, whichever one applies to text) against the Apollo developer.

But that would be contrary to Reddit’s actual goals, which is to monetize their user’s data as much as possible. They can’t do that if third party apps are providing a better experience, so they are trying to force everyone to use only the website and apps that are directly controlled by Reddit. So they can track our behavior and sell more ads.

If they want to keep our data, realistically nothing we can do will stop them.

I had the same mental debate when I deleted my Facebook account years ago and realized I just don’t have any power in this situation. I am deleting things mostly for my benefit; it’s symbolic, like throwing away the remaining pack of cigarettes. That act by itself does nothing, but it sure doesn’t hurt my chances of actually kicking the habit.

In this case, even if the data is still buried somewhere in Reddit’s servers, if enough people do the same it will destroy any “value” that Reddit has left as a company. Trying to undo all of that would be a massive, likely impractical undertaking that I’m comfortable betting simply won’t happen.

There are open source options. The main limitation is hardware. I would love to be able to reuse the half a dozen Google speakers I have for something local that works with Home Assistant!

Depends entirely on the subreddit, in my experience. Places like AskHistorians didn’t even exist when the great Digg exodus occurred. My favorite sub was /r/cfb which also benefited greatly from the mainstream popularity.

Not coincidental that both of these are relatively strongly moderated compared to many of the biggest/default subs.