joshinya

Reddit’s rise to prominence is in part a result of emphasis on facilitating the discourse Facebook used to be a place for. Facebook as a venue for discourse has gradually ended over the past decade or so, for the majority that still use it it is now just a centralised email server for sending event invitations.

No one has global Reddit traffic data except for Reddit - market estimation methods can’t really account for a deviation from the norm on such a short timeframe. Regardless, it’s the users that matter that are gone, we agree on that. The same ones that made Reddit the safehaven for Digg users to begin with.

I don’t think Reddit is going the way of the Dodo, it’s Reddit as a platform for discourse I’m on my soapbox about. Probably the largest exchange of ideas in human history happened on it. But the writing is now on the wall, to continue posting you first need to overcome the internal conflict of putting stock in a platform whose killer use case was predicated on user goodwill now burned. That itself is enough of an obstacle to make folks disengage, skewing the userbase, post quality declines, and then it’s just another cesspool. All of this takes time though

My personal compulsion to browse reddit certainly isn’t to think actively about the content I’m being fed, that’s kind of the whole point - here’s all the links you want spoonfed to you so you don’t need to seek them out. The algorithmic approach to content delivery is the core product, and it became popular because it is good method of consumption. But when content quality goes down on average, eventually you end up with a Facebook situation - those are the users that actually don’t care.

Thanks for the link, on the face of this I’m not sure if this really goes for or against my idea about the available metrics at hand not really being sufficient to make accurate/meaningful observations about the data. It certainly does feel to me like there’s an undeniably significant protest occuring on the platform now, even within the confines of established rules on reopened subs. And also datapoints not considered, such as subs which have been reopened by direct admin action, or under threat of it.

I’m just trying to summarise to be concise, this part is what I was getting at

look at how little it took for the protest to wane, some subs are still protesting or migrating, but the majority reopened and they’re going on like nothing happened.

I disagree that “the majority reopened”, of a total proportion of subs that blacked out I think the majority are either blacked out or have not resumed operations as normal. This is different from a majority proportion of all subs, which is a much larger number, and the majority of which also never participated in any blackout. Since the majority of traffic on reddit goes to a minority of subs, it’s not clear which metric you’re looking at or whether it’s meaningful in context.

Since reddit algorithms to some extent relied upon that consistent operating principle of posts in popular subs being boosted, initially the result of the blackout was extreme - the website could not functionally aggregate posts on most users frontpages with so many subs on private mode. But that is not a problem directly caused by the blackout, it’s caused by reliance on consistent data. So all reddit needed to do in that case was adjust the algo to significantly improve the average user experience during peak blackout. Instead of users seeing a bunch of posts about private subs they can’t interact with, they just get fed posts from subs that didn’t black out, so users could engage with reddit while an active ongoing protest was happening on the platform and might not even notice.

So I guess my point is that someone’s impression of how the frontpage looked at t+24hrs, or t+48hrs, or today, as an indication of how reddit’s going right now, is inaccurate because of the inherently subjective nature of the information visible from just browsing the platform.

Calm before the storm, sure. Most migration away from reddit (whether the migration ultimately proves to be consequential or not) will logically happen when the measures that made users migrate actually go into effect.

Either that or the community’s reaction to the 3rd party app thing was overblown. In the specific circumstances I don’t think it was.

That’s a more realistic clear and present danger to the platform IMO - an influx of actual users that makes the numbers to date pale in comparison.

The way the respective platforms handle bots is subtly different, but in a way that could result in profound changes either good or bad. But we haven’t actually seen that yet, and the software is still a work in progress. The existing migration has really lit a fire under the devs on issues that were identified years ago where progress has been slow, so for now I’m happy to let that play out and happy with what we’ve already got. I’m sure if bots become a bigger problem then that’s what devs will shift focus toward.

If not for the reddit blackout, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Characterizing the recent action against reddit as an inconsequential 2 day blackout is inaccurate I think. Shitposts and memes are the content that exists independent of platform, it’s not what made Reddit popular.

Coming from reddit is fun app, I don’t really understand how what you’re proposing would work. You want the same functionality of having a separate account on each instance, but consolidated into one app to easy switch between accounts/instances, right?

If we translate this use case into the existing rif app layout, the subreddit selector panel on the left would need to have like lemmy instances instead of subreddits, with communities nested under each instance.

So you would have a different frontpage for each instance, which consisted of only the posts for communities hosted by that instance. Maybe I’m on the wrong track here, or you have a better idea of how it’d work.

How is that better or more intuitive than just having one personal frontpage for all of your subscribed communities? That way you don’t even need to make a conscious decision to browse beehaw posts, they’re just in the same feed as everything else.

I feel like it’s more about the way you’re thinking about posts being hosted on a particular server and what that means. In the context of Lemmy it only means something where the post you want is on an instance that’s been defederated from for whatever reason, and even then only in terms of community discovery. Otherwise it’s kinda meaningless in terms of your interaction with posts.

Thinking of the given community as a community ‘on beehaw’ per se is only really pertinent in cases where the fact it’s on beehaw alone has some kind of impact on how you interact with it, e.g moderation style. But even in that case, moderation style could equally be an attribute you ascribe to the community itself, rather than beehaw. e.g. preferring r/games over r/gaming.

This way it makes more sense to think of the community as a lemmy community than a beehaw one, which seems fairly intuitive to me. Plus, that way the instance is doing the link aggregation and not your phone, which would be problematic for users and for scaling the ecosystem

Yep the original post on the beehaw instance is like a master record of the post that lives on their server and only their users and users from federated instances can interact with it. Meanwhile the act of a lemmy.world user subscribing to a given beehaw community triggers the lemmy.world instance to archive posts there and create separate self-contained records of them which only lemmy.world users can interact with

Yeah, that’s federation. In terms of the principle in government as well as its application in the lemmy protocol.

lemmy.world and beehaw.org are defederated. However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t see beehaw posts as a lemmy.world user, or vice versa. But (let’s say you’re a lemmy.world user) if you comment on a beehaw post, you’re commenting on a replicated version of the post that is hosted on lemmy.world. It is not synced with the original post hosted on beehaw, and you will only be able to see comments from other lemmy.world users and comments from before beehaw defederated.

Federation is by definition a union, a mutual agreement. A and B are either federated or they aren’t, there is no “A is federated with B but B is not federated with A”.

So if A and B are federated and B and C are federated but not A and C, and your scenario happens, the person on B sees your comment but the person on C doesn’t see it and can’t reply to it.