So I have thoughts about what if platforms that we seemly are trying to move away from such as Reddit decided to Fedirate and join the Fediverse.
Do you think it would be beneficial or practical in the long run?
How do you think people would change their thoughts of the Fediverse if platforms like Reddit did do this sort of thing?
What would you do if Reddit did join the Fediverse?
It would be deliciously ironic, since way back at the dawn of Reddit they had originally planned to have a “federated” model that let other people run their own interconnected Reddit servers. They open-sourced their code in preparation. But then they realized they could make all the money for themselves and ditched that plan.
I’ve heard Reddit was open source, but has anyone else ever hosted it before?
There are several instances out there based on the old source.
I think ultimately, this would be the best move for the users, and would open them up to a lot more content all across the board. But Reddit does not care about its users, so it won’t happen.
As others have said already, they won’t do that anyway … but in the hypothetical, unlikely scenario that they announced that they do, indeed, want to join the Fediverse, I would be super sceptical about their incentive. Do they want to somehow take over the various platforms one after another to monetize that content? To they want to screw up the Fediverse deliberately so the “redditfugees” that came here don’t have a reddit alternative anymore - to eliminate competition? I wouldn’t trust them to join for a “good” reason. Not after all the lies, slander and obvious, blatant bullshit Spez has pulled off.
He had multiple chances to stop the dumpster fire from burning, but instead fetched the gasoline. I’m all for giving people a “second” chance, but not a third, and definitely not an eighth or so chance. That time is over.
@justlookingfordragon Yeah I hope they just fail and people decide to move across, not sure if it would be easier if they just collapse or if they keep messing up to the point people just look for alternatives like Kbin and Lemmy.
Beneficial yes, practical no.
Beneficial because Reddit captured a ton of niche communities that used to exist on forums/usenet/etc, and there’s a lot of actual unique, useful content buried under all the noise. Ideally that content would be able to filter back into places that aren’t tied to some startup that never figured out how to be profitable.
Impractical because I imagine quite a few servers would have to defederate because they simply wouldn’t be able to manage mirroring the constant stream of stuff coming out of Reddit. It’s a bit early to tell how long any of the general interest reddit-a-likes can sustain on donations or whatever, and turning on that firehose would transform some hobbyist servers into money pits fast.
@gradecurve Yeah I would say the Fediverse as a whole needs to be slowly moving bringing people in otherwise a wave for millions of people if Reddit or any other big tech social media did fall it could break the Fediverse so fast.
That would be great, all the content, none of the ads (unless you’re actually on Reddit).
So crazy anyone had ads on reddit! I think I saw one like 3 years ago. I can’t remember seeing an ad for anything other than reddit on reddit.
PSA the internet is better when you have ublock origin installed. Add it to every browser. It is even on the very short list of extensions that work in firefox mobile without any rigamarole.
@Wooly Yeah not sure how the Fediverse keep going on in the run as it helps earning money to run the servers.
Bigger servers will run on donations, personal ones are hobby projects and will disappear if their owners die or get too old and no-one in their family or friendgroup is interested in keeping it running. Corporate ones (where only PR people of the respective corporation have accounts) will be considered an investment in PR and exist as long as the Fediverse is socially relevant. Some server might end up being financed by a well off person putting in their will that their money should be put in a trust and the interest used to keep the server running.
@curiosityLynx I agree, I feel as if the Fediverse might end up with some bigger servers that are gonna run even know the original creators have passed on due to money and stuff. Smaller servers like personal ones sure most of them might go offline unless families and friends pay for it.
Even with this, it’s good to be able to control your data as well as your next of kin can decide on what they wish to do, as they might just want to preserve your accounts and make them not federalized or keep it federalized and use it for there own posts as well. It’s something that would be interesting to see.
I think it’ll be fine with donations, I remember seeing a post from lemmy.ml(?) Admins where they said it cost $30 to run the servers and they’d already received $1500 in donations.