You don’t get to be that rich by paying bills.

As a long-time cryptocurrency observer, it is going to be very amusing (in a bitter sort of way) seeing everyone discovering that they’re trying to solve the same problems that cryptocurrencies have been working on solving for over a decade now. And then finding all sorts of ways to contort themselves into solving them differently from how cryptocurrencies did it so that nobody can accuse them of being “crypto bros” or whatever, even though the technology is perfectly applicable as-is.

Indeed. I was expecting a two-week “calm before the storm” at this point, as the protest blackout ended but the API was not yet removed. But the protest continued and Reddit keeps stirring the pot. Interesting times.

I know that in the end Reddit will be able to brute-force themselves a “win”, but if the Fediverse gets a nice solid critical mass of users as a result then I think Reddit’s destined for a long decline.

I think we’ll see a temporary “return to normalcy” after the protest finishes and most subs come back online. But come June 30 and the end of third-party apps, we’ll see a bunch of users come back to Lemmy/Kbin again.

In a way, this seems like the best way of driving things. The protest has raised awareness and got a ton of development work going, and then there’s going to be a respite giving instances time to prepare themselves for the second surge.

The ones that are permanently blacking out are the hardest. I kept telling myself that if nothing else, at least I could visit the pale shadows of the old places I enjoyed via desktop. But /r/dndmemes is probably closing forever and I wasn’t quite ready for that.

There’s /c/[email protected], though, and perhaps others eventually. So the magic may someday return.

The ones that are permanently blacking out are the hardest. I kept telling myself that if nothing else, at least I could visit the pale shadows of the old places I enjoyed via desktop. But /r/dndmemes is probably closing forever and I wasn’t quite ready for that.

There’s /c/[email protected], though, and perhaps others eventually. So the magic may someday return.

It’s not surprising, but IMO the shutdown is still worthwhile. It’s shaking people loose to start looking for alternatives, and giving those alternatives opportunity to shake themselves down too. We’re not quite ready for a Digg-style implosion yet. It may come more gradually this time.

What might be neat is a user preference that allows one to enable or disable downvoting just for you. If you disable downvoting then you get a different view of the community and comments that only accounts for upvotes.

This is the number one source of reassurance I give people who object that Lemmy is “overrun by tankies.” That was just the earliest niche community that happened to jump ship in this particular direction. Now, even at this early stage, Lemmy is being overrun by everyone else.

Older audiences are more likely to dislike the new changes, though. They’ve been on Reddit for a long time and will be aware of how much better it used to be.

The only hope I have for Reddit - and it’s a vain one, I fully recognize - is that after shareholders buy it they might put a board of directors in place who go “hey, our userbase is bleeding profusely and Reddit alternatives are flourishing, maybe we should do something to staunch that if we want this thing to retain any value.”

The current owners evidently don’t believe that, so an IPO that swaps them out is the only option.

They’re /r/unexpected, so if they were to state one or the other I don’t know if that could be trusted anyway.

I am really not into porn that much :)

Heh. I feel we may have a common attitude here; I’m not particularly into smut but I think it’s very important for a free Internet to allow it to flourish for those that want it. The common “No NSFW” restriction on major Lemmy instances is likely to be one of the major hurdles to attracting Reddit refugees, alongside the particular political positions that devs and major instance-runners currently espouse.

I suspect both of those things will be diluted away quickly as this space evolves, though.

Indeed. I’ve used RiF forever with Reddit, it has such a nice clean interface and is so well polished. It’s such a shame to throw something like that away.

ChatGPT is really good at writing boring boilerplate. Just make sure to read the output thoroughly before you make it actual policy.

Moderation will be important for porn communities, so perhaps just start out with some kind of “meta” community where you can discuss stuff about the instance itself. May be better than throwing down a bunch of communities and ending up “stuck” having to deal with them.

Even better is to post the text of paywalled articles so people without access can still read them.

If the fediverse is going to make the big times it’s going to have e to handle porn.

That’s how I wound up here too.

How very magnanimous of Reddit. They went way too far, and now they’re inching backward to try to find the absolute limit of what they can get away with.