I found Reddit about 6 years ago, took a little while to understand what it was about but when I finally got it, I felt like I had found the best place on the internet. Somewhere I could be my true self without being myself. Every time I logged in, I felt free. Like solo roaming the streets of a new city in a foreign country for the first time. Intellectual conversation, assistance on vague problems, sharing life experiences, advice, watching porn you didn’t know existed, and then slipping out the back door when you were done.
As many here already know, those days are gone. The freedom is gone, it feels like a communist regime and it seems that their success is their downfall. The entire personality of Reddit has changed and will never come back, it even shows in the users. The community is broken, unauthentic and the Truth has left the conversation. Freedom is dead over there. What a shame. It’s like my favorite bar burnt down.
But the thing that really gets me is that it didn’t just change, it became the exact opposite. It has become the exact reason why someone built it, in the first place.
I read that it’s attracting the most new users of all the social apps. Best performing app, which means the end is near. Soon it will just be a limb of the pretend society that we used to hide from behind the walls of Reddit. And for some reason, I just want to see it burn.
Ive been around long enough to know its an inevitable cycle, hopefully federation saves lemmy from the same fate.
That was my next question… is it inevitable? Like the fall of every major power in human history. At some point they break.
Expect some (additonal) really nice privately owned Federated instances to launch after Reddit finally dies. (Embrace - Twitter and Mastodon are far enough along that Bluesky exists, already.)
They will have all the usual features, but also a few surprisingly nice additonal (closed source, added by corporate sponsors) features. It will cost some mild annoyance when visiting from an open source truly free federated instance. (Extend)
Eventually the new features will result in lost compatibility with the rest of the fediverse. Users on the new platform can enjoy the rest of the fediverse, but other fediverse users cannot reach any content contributed by users of the new platform. So everyone needs an account on the new platform, to enjoy it. (Extinguish)
Then the new platform enshitifies. (Enshitify)
This prediction is primarily based on how Google managed “Google Talk” when it joined XMPP. Many feel XMPP did not survive it. I still use XMPP, but many folks I talked to on XMPP do not.
The recipe is: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, Enshitify.
I’m not sure about this, but does defederation or blocking work both ways? I.e can an instance stop federating their own content to another instance? I would think so. It seems like corporate instances be pretty effectively boycotted like that.
I think it’s by choice in each direction? I’m not sure.
Yes. And I think that’s our best defense against what happened to XMPP. Opinions vary, of course. I guess it’ll be up to each instance owner how they handle it.
I hope so. I worry because they say “history usually rhymes”.
At the very least, the fediverse was designed with knowledge of lessons learned from XMPP. And I’m certainly, myself, less naive than I was when I fell for Google Talk. Hopefully others are too.
Almost certainly yes, once lemmy gets big enough and people in power actually give a shit about it.
The nature of the internet is something has to be hosted somewhere, no matter how obscure eventually there’s a source and assholes can apply pressure on the source / host.
Most people running an instance don’t have the money nor will to fight governments and mega corps when they uncorck their bullshit attacks