This past few months I’ve gotten into Trackmania. It really is the perfect “settle down for the evening and play with a video on the other monitor”. I can just grind out records, while only needing two fingers max on my keyboard, and just enough attention.

I think there is probably a mix of things going on.

First, the angriest people already did leave.

Second, people suck at protesting. I mean, the entire reason it was a 2-day protest instead of defaulting to indefinite is because the idea of sacrificing your own habits in a protest blows people’s minds. There is a reason “slacktivism” is a thing.

Third, there is probably a segment of the user base who basically got their addiction checked. Social media is addicting, and reddit is not exception, I mean, even I’ve kept habitually opening the site this whole week just cause that has been my browsing habit for over a decade. It’s just how I’ve check ed news.

And then lastly, the protest reached the more casual core of people who may have not even known about the protest before hand or understood the extent of it, and they are angry that this thing that didn’t affect them took away all their content.

A part of me believes they will give some bs reason to keep their “scab” mods immune, but I would love if they didn’t and the chaos that would ensue.

Ostensibly they don’t wish to scale at the expense of the quality of their community.

Its both a value add and a negative. For those more focused on their own community (Like beehaw) it’s an obvious positive. But for many users, losing access to certain communities on your own instance of choice is going to be a negative. I personally don’t blame Beehaw for favoring the former. I think improved moderation tools and more granular federation would at least make the move less of a blow to users.

For reasons no one can fathom

The ROM hacking community takes this personally.

ROM hacking and well, just retro development like this is awesome. I think there is something to be said about the creativity that comes with a limited canvas and so on

To be honest, 2023 has feel relatively calmer than the past few, I guess covid being that all encompassing to life. Of the things on your list I do think AI is probably the first thing that comes to mind when I think of what we are “on the brink of”. This leap that happened the past couple years in LLM was shocking enough, wondering what the next couple are going to look like.

Certainly so. From a sort of… sociological point I’m wondering what the impacts are of major instances growing independent of each other. I feel like I can already feel it with kbin and lemmy both growing separately during the blackout. I’m wondering if the trend for major instances is going to be where each one has their own unique culture or if they will eventually homogenize.

Only real concern here, although I didn’t participate during the mastodon surge last year, I heard that defederation became a bit of an issue with how common there. Granted, I feel like the impact is probably less here with the fact that you are interacting with topics rather than people.

To be honest, I had such low expectations for the blackout, I’m actually surprised how much impact it did have. This was never going to be the reddit killer. There is a reason why the 1% principle exists. Most people don’t care, and most people who do aren’t going to actually put in the effort to change their browsing habits. It’s part of why being an early member of new sites like these are the best, because the people joining are the people who are actively seeking out new communities.

Yup, exactly. Welcome to the fediverse!

There is traction, and in fact already a fix in review.

Ah interesting. I actually see this post over there so it seems replies from kbin are actually federating now. The question is if I will see my own comment.

Edit: I do! Great news

Ironically, still some issues with the federation, so we can see them but they can’t see us. We’re in the walls.

Ernest might have also gotten up more servers to handle the load, noticing that cloudflare is off and we are federating again (this is a beehaw thread)

Ohh, I like zines as a shortened version

The true fear is when everything passes locally and then suddenly fails on the CICD pipeline.

There are so many ways they could have made it viable. Like comically easy. But that was never what they were interested in. The thing that they aren’t willing to just come out and say, is that their own app is built to generate advertising revenue. They have absolutely zero interest in fostering a 3rd party community, and the only concessions they are going to make are for things that actually have a chance at saving the spending money (i.e. make sure the free labor they get from moderators stays and make sure other people deal with questions like accessibility).

I’m sure there are some people purchasing those, but you also get some for free. Looks like I have 800 worth I could give out.

So business as usual for reddit

Yes and no, as a 12 year vet.

Reddit is not what it was when I joined. Back in the early 2010’s reddit really felt like the internet’s evolution from forums. Not going to pretend it was the first, but it really did feel like something was special about it. The community aspect was really important back then. All of the sudden, it felt like you could literally build a community around anything, with little effort, and the “Build it and they will come” factor would kick in.

But things have spoiled since then. We have over a decade worth of “Eternal Septembers”, and being a redditor turned into “being a redditor” has turned into, we’ll it’s just another part of social media infrastructure. Pretty much everybody I know who has use the site has basically sectioned themselves off from using the site as a a whole and just have their specific subs that they browse. I’m a programmer so I basically just use it for the programming subs and different games I play like OSRS, Factorio, etc.

And I guess, a last thought, I don’t think reddit is going to die from this. I would wager the vast majority of the userbase really doesn’t give a shit, and to be honest, that is fine. Like I said, reddit is part of internet social infrastructure at this point. It’s probably still going to be useful to prefix google searches with “reddit some product” to find the best human reviews of that product. But for me, I don’t really feel the need to keep using it day to day. I’m looking for a community and I can find it elsewhere.