oh my… what exactly are they planning to do? Replacing moderators with trolls?
this whole debacle makes me sad. Reddit is not in the right in my opinion. At least this time its real-time enshitttification so maybe some more people notice and don‘t get frog-cooked.
Lurkers don‘t make a community all on their own. And I am sure it is not just moderator‘s that are pissed off. And I am a lurker 99% of the time and all of this leaves such a bad taste that I do not know if I will return to reddit unless they have a drastic change of heart (heart? what heart?).
I wish we would put humans at the center of our attention more.
PS.
If they had writtten „mod team“ instead of „any moderators“ I would have assumed a slightly more benevolent intent.
It has a slight smell to me of “we’re looking for a name the community will recognise to break mod team solidarity and become a trustie”. But I have a nasty suspicious mind.
(Also I’ve never been much of a reddit user anyway.)
There is no slight smell about it, it’s exactly what they’re doing. Moderators at reddit have graduated permissions, and in large subs it’s usual to have only one or a few people with full privs, and a larger number with the ability to read the subs modmail, remove posts and ban people. they’ve removed some full mods and replaced them with junior people, presumably where one of the junior people said “I will do your bidding.”
Also the boss is a Musk fanboy and is looking at Twitter and thinking “yeah, that’s the way I should take this company”. Also the boss proposes to sell the entire Reddit corpus for “AI” training data.
This is also why they’ve been undeleting deleted user data, which gets them a nice fight with the EU’s data protection office, just what you want when you’re gearing up for an IPO.
(I suspect the main cause of this is that the VC funders still want huge growth-phase returns even though Reddit is no longer in growth phase, and don’t mind if the company is destroyed to do it - because then they can put their money into the next growth-phase company that replaces it.)
I read r/blind moderator’s report of their meeting with reddit about accessibilty. the TLDR is “F you, and your users. Trust us.” The slightly longer version is “fuck you and your users. We will make reddit accessible, but we won’t tell you if the people who are doing it are qualified to do so, we won’t tell you what we mean by accessible, we won’t tell you when it will happen, we won’t tell you what existing 3rd party apps we consider to be accessibity assistants. Also, foad”.
(It’s posted in r/blind, if anyone cares to read for themselves.)
Today there was an announement on lemmy that r/blind has migrated or is migrating to the fediverse.
I also saw multiple posts (on both lemmy and reddit) on the whole drama with nsfw subreddits and r/mildlyinteresting (et al) and I just cannot imagine the kind of turnaround reddit-the-company would need to do to end this shitshow. Also there is no sign that they are ever going to come up for air… they seem to have met their iceberg. (Titanic references seem apt at the moment)
I think I am not going back to reddit. I surfed a few posts on reddit today and a lot more on lemmy. There is already enough content for me on lemmy. It gives me a very similar experience to reddit. Smaller but still big enough so I can just read a bit here and there like I do on reddit.
Sure there is also some drama about de-federating instances and about meta wanting to join the fediverse because nobody wants the metaverse…
I am still getting used to some of the peculiarities about federation that seem more prominent on lemmy than on mastodon.
So instead of one central thing like twitter, the fediverse (to which mastodon belongs) is a distributed network that speaks one protocol (ActivityPub). In this network there are a variety of servers with a variety of different services that are hosted by a variety of parties.
The service that is most like twitter is Mastodon and was developed sometime around 2016 by Eugen Rochko (afaik) probably not by himself. Other services include Lemmy and Kbin (the reddit-alikes). These all speak the same “digital language” aka protocol.
For Mastodon →
You select a home-server which is a bit like an eMail Address so you get a tag like me yashima@mastodon.online
Yashima is my username. Mastodon.online is the server where I registered.
Then you can follow people like on twitter. But you do not just need their handle, you also need their server.
The protocol mostly handle the rest.
To get started there is a catalog somewhere which has a list of instances.
So I began a long while ago ~2017 when mastodon first started up and chose to go with mastodon.cloud one of the biggest instances back then.
However, I recently moved to mastodon.online because the cloud instance is too big. Moving to a new instance is easy, my followers moved with me and I can export who I am following and re-import it on the new instance.
This time I chose mastodon.online because it is run by a German non-profit Verein in Berlin. I considered an account on a bunch of other instances before that.
Which instance you are on matters mostly in regards to who is running it and therefore controlling what the rules are, what moderation takes place and which other instances may be blocked (part of the moderation efforts is to block instances filled with spam and hate-speech). I looked for an instance that had sensible rules and a sensible approach to blocking.
Hope this helps.
PS: the cool thing about activity pub is that I could follow lemmy communities from my mastodon account. (i also have a lemmy account though)
PPS: I am using the official mastodon apps on both android and iOS they are fine. jerboa for lemmy on android is also nice. more apps are being developed as I write…
The whole “pick a server to join” thing has been held up as a sticking point, but I think it’s worth noting that it’s not a huge commitment: you can move to another server later and preserve your follower relationships.
I looked for a server that had been reliably up for a few months and was relatively small (and, you know, not hatey).
This is basically the only friction preventing me from joining Mastodon. Albeit, there’s not a lot of force being exerted on my part either, so the smallest amount of friction has brought it, effectively, to a halt.
Mostly, I don’t want to have to monitor the political environment of whichever instance I join, because ultimately I don’t care and it’s easy enough to move, but that’s still something else that has to fit into my daily life that I just don’t care about.
EDIT: also looking at the instances, I have so many varying interests, it seems silly to choose an instance that focuses on just one of them.
I want to note that a) very fitting address and b) the instance you are on does not need to provide for all your interests… federation makes your interests accessible everywhere.
edit: one more nice thing: you can follow hashtags on mastodon like Boardgames or #catsofMastodon (lots and lots of catpics)
edit again: I just entered the lemmy url for the boardgames community from feddit.de (the german lemmy instance I am on) into the search of mastodon and was able to “follow” the community from mastodon. I am curious how that is going to work out
