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If it ends up that meta is able to destroy the fediverse simply by joining it, that is a design flaw on OUR end.

“Simply by joining it” is not an accurate representation of what will happen in the slightest. Meta is not some scrappy little Lemmy instance operator relying on donations to keep the lights on, they’re one of the biggest companies in the world who simply do not care about fair competition or open standards, and they have a proven track record of using that position to either buy out or destroy competition.

When Meta have so much money that they can simply outspend any other fediverse platform and become dominant that way, how is that a design flaw on our end? You can make a project as resistant to corporate overreach as you like, infrastructure to run it still costs money and there is no fediverse operator on the face of the earth that is going to be able to outspend Meta when it comes to infrastructure and R&D. How is defederation not an appropriate response when smaller instances are crippled under the inevitable load stemming from Metas users?

Corporations have been embracing, extending and extinguishing FOSS projects in the tech space for decades now, and their demise has rarely been because of a fatal flaw in the projects themselves. It’s been an intentional play by Microsoft, Google et al to ensure that there is no viable open alternative to their walled gardens. Trusting them in any capacity is naïve at best and catastrophic at worst.

I encourage you to read this blog post which outlines these concerns much better than I can: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

Tech bros are a scourge on society.

Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. Still amazing to this day.

Meh - maybe Reddit will live on, maybe it’ll die. It’s immaterial and worrying about it is a waste of energy. What we need to concentrate on is keeping the forward momentum going and making Lemmy into a truly viable alternative. The rest will follow.

Now I get to reflexively open Lemmy instead! Yay!

I believe now more than ever that any site that revolves around a community should be in the hands of said community and not corporations or else this eventually happens

This is how it used to be before the internet for most people basically became five websites run by enormous corporations. Forums/bulletin boards/IRC channels used to be run by the community for the community and in my opinion the internet was better for it. Sure you’d get the odd flame war or power-tripping mod, but it was super common for a large portion of the community to just up sticks and start a new forum somewhere else if it became too much of a problem. Then Reddit killed most of the hobbyist forums stone dead. There’s nothing to go back to so we have to start fresh. But honestly, I’m here for it. I’m tired of being the product for a bunch of advertisers. Take me back to 2004.

Easiest way to do it is to type [email protected] into the search on your home instance, should pop right up. I agree that this can be irritating though.

I haven’t been able to find a Sleep Token community either, I’m not sure one actually exists. I was thinking of making one.

You could try this page to find communities though, it indexes most of the large instances: https://browse.feddit.de/

The tech giving me hope for the future isn’t the one currently consuming as much energy as a small country to store JPEGs on the blockchain for rich people to flex with.

Only people I feel for is the workers at Reddit. Not their fault their boss is an asshole.

It was a few days ago, I’ve just been told it’s back online now.

Interesting, I wonder if they’ve decided that the negative publicity of appearing to censor alternative platforms wouldn’t be worth it. Begs the question as to why they’re still apparently removing links to lemmy.ml if that’s the case though.

NTA. They’ve tried to screw us all for money and if there’s any justice in the world they’re about to find out what made their site so attractive to investors the hard way. Fuck ‘em.

/r/WallStreetBets will probably find a way to lay it to waste in the first ten minutes.

I wouldn’t put it past them in an attempt to protect their IPO. It’ll be exposed almost immediately, but it’s not like an idea being terrible has stopped spez before.

They banned the RedditAlternatives sub a few days ago. If it wasn’t the case before, it probably is now. This situation must be rattling some cages at Reddit regardless of what Spez said.

Maybe so. It wouldn’t be the first time - I’ve left platforms that have gone downhill before and I’ll do it again. But it is psychologically difficult to let go of a site that I’ve used for over a decade and made so many connections through. That’s how they get you I suppose, the sunk cost fallacy.

Excellent, I can only hope more join them.

Yeah, I noticed the same. All it really showed me was how many subs didn’t black out…

Is he wrong though?

We all know that users are going to come flooding back as soon as the closed subs open again. Reddit has been through controversy after controversy and has only grown in size. The truth is that most people on Reddit don’t really care about third party apps, a lot didn’t even know they existed before the Apollo dev spilled the tea on his conversations with Reddit. Spez knows this and is counting on it.

For this protest to have any teeth at all, the protesting subs need to stay blacked out indefinitely until Reddit starts negotiating realistically, or they start hemorrhaging users to alternative platforms.

Spez has told Reddit staff that the Reddit blackout “will pass”.

He’s right, it will. And that’s the problem.

A two day blackout means nothing to Spez and Reddit. What it tells them is “we can treat the userbase and developers like shit and they’ll still use our platform for the other 363 days of the year”.

The only thing that will force Reddit to the negotiating table is blacking out indefinitely. Not a single protesting subreddit opens back up until they realise what made the company so attractive to investors in the first place.