This article kinda makes me hope for reddit to survive. I want all the toxic, angry assholes to stay there, not desperately flee to the fediverse in search of their fix.
No, defederation isn't shadowed. If an instance defederates from you, you stop receiving content from them, and it's pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that you've been defederated.
Plus, on Lemmy at least, block lists are publicly viewable.
That's not how I understood defederation. If an instance defederates from you, that instance stops seeing stuff from your instance. But not necessarily the other way around, as defederation is a one-way action.
So if the Cow instance defederates from the Poopie instance, people from the Poopie instance can still see content and comments from Cow users. But Cow users cannot see content or comments from Poopie users. For the scenario you're describing to take place, the Poopie instance would also need to defederate from the Cow instance.
That said, it's still not quite shadowbanning. The admins of the defederated Poopie instance would be aware that Cows were not seeing their content. It would depend on the admins to inform the Poopie users that they've been defederated. If the users were not aware of the defederation, then it'd effectively be a shadowban.
If an instance defederates from you, that instance stops seeing stuff from your instance. But not necessarily the other way around, as defederation is a one-way action.
I invite you to check out, say, [email protected] from lemmy.world, and from beehaw.org directly. You'll notice that .world isn't receiving updates from beehaw. A couple of posts seem to have filtered through somehow, but there are almost no posts or comments coming from beehaw.
The group is completely out of sync with its origin. And it's not because .world has blocked beehaw. Beehaw very much still appears under .world's list of linked websites.
Blocked instances are blocked, and when you block communication between sites, that's usually a two-way street.
Edit: Hi Lemmy users! You can't see the screenshots I've attached to this comment. I've just learned this thanks to @B1naryShad0w. If you'd like to see my comments with the screenshots, please view this comment thread via kbin by clicking this link.
(1/2)
I've looked at a few examples, and I'm just super confused now. I've also tried searching for a simple explanation of what exactly defederation does, and I keep seeing conflicting descriptions.
Let's look at two examples (please bear with me as I only know how to attach one image to one comment at a time.) On this comment let's look at AskLemmy, a lemmy.world community, from Beehaw:
Notice that all threads (with one exception) were posted almost a month ago when defederation happened. That one exception was a Beehaw user who posted to AskLemmy 5 days ago. So we can see that BeeHaw, having defederated from lemmy.world, is blocking 100% of new content from this lemmy.world community, except for that one thread published by a Beehaw user who seems to be out of the loop 5 days ago.
Mostly makes sense to me so far. Beehaw defedearted from lemmy.world, so Beehaw can't see new stuff from this lemmy.world community. A little weird that there was a new post by a Beehaw user, but that still makes some sense with my previous understanding of how defederation worked, since I think(?) defederation is one-way. After all, if defederation was two-way, then how did a Beehaw user make a thread on lemmy.world?
Now lets look at Beehaw's technology community from lemmy.world:
On the one hand, this is not blocking 100% of the content from this community, which seems consistent with what I originally thought. Lemmy.world is not defederated with beehaw, so lemmy.world can see new content from Beehaw's communities.
But on the other hand, there is a ton of content missing. And it's not just federated content taking awhile to move from instance to instance, as I'm seeing posts from the last 24 hrs from Kbin that are not showing up on lemmy.world. So it appears that there is content that's being blocked from getting to lemmy.world. But it's not 100% of the content that's being blocked?
To make matters more confusing, I can see content published by Beehaw users on a Beehaw community from lemmy.world. Wtf is going on.
For what it’s worth, there is a big problem with Lemmy.world federation. Lots and lots of posts to/from LW and other fully-federated instances take days to show, if at all.
I suspect it’s something to do with their size, but I base that on absolutely nothing.
Hrm it seems defederation needs some work put into it. If an instance defederates from another, there should be no way to see each other, one way or another.
I appreciate the effort and have also verified your analysis myself to be true. However, and I don’t know if it’s just me, but I don’t see any images attached to your comments.
Thanks for calling that out. It looks like attaching images directly to a comment only works for kbin instances. This is what it looks like from kbin.social. I just tried viewing this thread from lemmy.world and the images were not showing up.
To be honest, I don't want to go through the effort of editing my comments to correct it right now. But in the future I'll go back to hosting images and linking them in my comments, so anyone from any instance can see them. That's a shame, because attaching images to comments in Kbin is super convenient. Oh well! Thanks again for letting me know.
I read a post by the Beehaw admins a couple weeks ago saying they were talking to the lemmy.world admin about resolving the issues that caused them to defederate, so it’s possible that they were no longer defederated when the post you found was made. My understanding is that automatic updates only happen when users on one instance are subscribed to the community on the other instance, so refederation might not be obvious. I expect they would have cut the cord again over yesterday’s security breach, though.
That’s pure speculation on my part, though, and quite possibly it was some kind of bug. But I am not particularly tech-savvy, so I tend to wonder about non-technical causes.
There is. Lemmy.ml is currently shadowbanning kbin for unknown reasons.
Lemmy.ml is blocking the bots kbin uses for federation. The devs have ignored anyone asking why. It's been weeks and only applies to Lemmy.ml, so it appears to be intentional. They're running slightly different code on their flagship site than what all the other instances use (which makes me wonder what else Lemmy.ml has changed compared to what's publicly available).
OLD angry assholes who don’t know how to navigate social media. They need Facebook because it’s easy and you can comfortably be a racist, homophobic, entitled prick and you’ll find a big audience that will stroke your ego.
Kind of happened in r/apple you used to get the occasional good discussion in the comments until the last few weeks of 3rd party apps then it was an absolute cesspool of hate and trolls as people seemed to leave for other sites
Zero regrets. So far the content has been better and people have been nicer, the experience on Lemmy app I use is very similar to the 3rd party Reddit app I was using, and the official Reddit app is so much worse than both of them that I am not at all tempted to use it.
Ngl I miss all the niche communities from reddit that actually had content. Like there's nothing for The West Wing or The Wire on the lemmybin. Last hype shit for Starfield on the largest Starfield Magazine was like 3 days ago.
Not that I really need or get that much out of that content but it's shit I like to talk about. And sure I can create the communities or post the content, but it's like yelling into an abyss right now.
That'll change as more people join, of course, it's just a part I miss.
I don't trust those snakes. I'm working on code to use reddit's website and edit comments one at a time (one per minute so they don't think it's bot activity) and I'm going to deploy the code a month or two from now after the API is gone - because I want them to think they've "won" before I over-write and then erase a decade's worth of content
So I'm not a traditional programmer - I don't use a lot of the common software and such. I have a lot of prior experience using AutoItScript automated software so I'll probably use that to mimic keystrokes and clicks on my computer screen once I have programmed exact positions for things - it'll likely be a very specific set of code for my computer.
But I may create an account on github and share if there's enough interest lol
More simple than that - I'll likely use AutoItScript for windows - literally automate clicking links or simulating keystrokes (like the tab key) until it reaches the desired link then clicking the edit function, revising text, tab to the save button, saving change, and repeat over and over.
It's crude and inefficient, but I have over twenty years experience using the code for various small tasks so I'm sure I'll get the job done.
Just not sure when I want to start - I feel like they are still playing tricks un-deleting content and such for people using automated API code. So for now I've simply blocked reddit at the router level for another month or two before I go back and start writing my code to automate the deletion of 10+ years worth of content.
I think it’s more like saying, “I saw this on my phone,” or, “I was on the computer and read,” which are both entirely reasonable.
It’s just stating what format you were using when you saw it. Like, “I was scrolling through Google News and read…” What you actually read was an article hosted on a different website, but you were using the platform of Google News to read it. It’s the same kind of thing as saying, “I read on Lemmy,” because you were browsing Lemmy when you read something.
It’s not wrong to say that these things are on this site. I often specify Lemmy.World because that’s the instance that I use and other Fediverse sites function slightly differently. That’s one of the both great and annoying things about the Fediverse is how every instance is slightly different. I’ll say, “I was on Lemmy.World and…” I don’t know, saw a post, made a post, had trouble because mod controls are minimal over here, whatever. Saying, “On the Fediverse,” is more generic. It’s usually considered best convention to go with more SPECIFIC terms than generic. I consider using my Mastadon account and using my Lemmy account to be different, but they’re both on the Fediverse. I would feel really weird talking about my Mastadon account in the same terms as my Lemmy.World one since I use the two platforms completely differently.
it’s more correct to say they’re on lemmy than kbin though… they are interacting through lemmy: kbin is literally irrelevant to them
… and that’s kinda the point of the fediverse isn’t it? you shouldn’t care where something is stored, and if you don’t care where it’s stored then you have only 1 way to refer to the space: the client by which you’re viewing it
people referring to it as “lemmy” or “kbin” or “mastodon” is the fediverse working as intended, and that’s good news!
(it’s also much better marketing for us! people search fediverse and they get a bunch of random descriptions about what it is… people search lemmy/kbin and at least they have a join button)
Mastodon is at least something of a more generalized term at least, because that's referring to hundreds of instances. And it has a specific (Twitter-esque) format that unites them. But Lemmy and Kbin has the same formatting structure (Reddit-esque). Makes me wonder if we need a specific, but generalized term that unites everything in this format.
Well, the Twitter-esque format also extends to Misskey and Pleroma, and there are tons of those accounts interacting seamlessly with Mastodon instances. So in a way those microblogging instances face the same issue you're describing between Lemmy and Kbin. In any case, I'm a fan of 'threadiverse' as a term for the Reddit-like instances.
You're absolutely right, presenting an awesome website first and allowing the true nature of the fediverse to sneak up on people is a great way to handle it. Even if someone learns about the fediverse as a whole first somehow, they'll need to figure out what 'portal' into it makes the most sense anyway.
No. I am on Lemmy.World right now viewing a KBin thread. My entire interaction here is through Lemmy.World and not KBin. So for me to say, “I was on KBin arguing with someone,” would be factually incorrect because I am not on KBin. It would be factually correct to say, “I was on the Fediverse arguing with someone,” but since the Fediverse has different forms, that interaction itself could take several forms and context does sometimes matter. There’s nothing wrong with the more generic The Fediverse, but there’s also nothing wrong with stating which instance you’re using to be more specific.
But the person you were arguing with wasn't arguing with you on Lemmy.world, so that's misleading on where the argument was taking place.
If someone took you at your word and looked on Lemmy.world in specific, they would not be able to find the argument in question, because it was taking place in a Kbin.social thread.
They absolutely would be able to find it on Lemmy.world. Here’s a link to this very argument: lemmy.world/comment/971144
Note that is on Lemmy.World. That’s part of why the Fediverse is great. You can find this argument which you’re engaging on KBin and I’m engaging on Lemmy.World on any similarly connected Fediverse site.
You're missing the point. If I email you, are we talking ON Gmail? ON Hotmail? Not really. We're using our different clients to interact with the same original message. Sure, the message gets converted to your emails specific formatting, but it's just a copy of the original info. The message itself is the conversation, the clients are just access to it.
You wouldn't say "I drove my Honda to the store". You'd say "I drove my car".
Nobody said "I'm browsing Apollo/Sync/RIF". You'd say "I'm browsing Reddit" or "fuck spez".
You're one step from being the mom that calls every video game system a "Nintendo".
Sometimes. People meeting in real life, exchanging email addresses, and noticing they're both on GMail, is common enough for some people, they really are on GMail. Implying they could chat trivially. But that's not applicable to the scenario under discussion.
Actually you'd just say you drove to the store. We don't really care if you own a car, a truck, and a SUV in your driveway. We don't expect you to have a horse and buggy.
The apostrophe is gonna get dropped eventually. Same as it did for 'net meaning internet.
I doubt fedi~ will be remembered after awhile. It'll be seen as pedantic, technical, or old school.
I don't know if people are generally sci-fi enough to think of you as on "planet Lemmy" but it would have a bit of snark like saying you're on planet Mars. Could be a good subculture lingo.
Maybe it's even more like "I got an outlook message" instead of "I got an email". Since email is an analog of ActivityPub. Just that people are not used yet to the fact that social media can be interoperable like email, so "saw on lemmy" carries different connotations. It should not, however.
Anecdotically, I have an old frendlica account too, from times of diaspora, and it's now very lively, so I saw this post on frendlica too.
reddit must have sent out a "remove the NSFW or we remove you" to all the subs that are still set to NSFW. I saw the same story for PICS and even the cyberpunkgame sub
In a way social media is a drug and most of us were addicted. At least I was on Reddit, because I liked being there. So not using it, especislly when it was kind of a habit may not be easy for many on virtue fo that alone.
There’s shitloads of secret communities everywhere. Discord is particularly popular. The reason they exist is that average people are only averagely intelligent and averagely interested in most topics, so if you want a higher level of content than average, you have to go where they can’t find you.
When a dance club is cool, nobody knows about it. When everyone finds out about it, those cool people go somewhere else. Being cool, itself, implies being something different enough from normal to necessitate its own word to differentiate it. Think hipster.
Average people made McDonalds the worlds most successful restaurant. Not everybody wants to live on big macs though. But on the internet, where the users control the content, they find your cool burger place and accidentally turn it into a McDonalds because they don’t know the difference.
In my experience, most people outgrow the secret clubs phase eventually. But I’m sure not everyone does. Who doesn’t like feeling special, no matter how unjustified it is?
I got added to it for a top post once. I opened the popular subreddit and the top post was something like, “Well, I’m here. Now what?”
I knew immediately it was dumb.
I think “secret” communities can be good when they’re for a specialized interest. But they don’t even have to be secret. Even just niche is great.
For example, the discord for the game PolyBridge is fucking incredible. I mean, it kind of sucks right now because they just released PolyBridge 3, so a lot of new people have (temporarily) joined.
But there are regulars who post hourly years after PolyBridge releases. There is even this one person called Arglin who posts absurdly complex essays on geometry and new discoveries within the game. They could be dissertations on mathematics.
If anyone is still reading this, I have to tell you about the Linkage Repository. This document is insane. For an Indie studio’s bridge building game lol.
In my experience, most people outgrow the secret clubs phase eventually. But I’m sure not everyone does. Who doesn’t like feeling special, no matter how unjustified it is?
** looks around at the Free Masons, Skull and Bones, and Illuminati **
Yes and no. Invite only clubs risk become extreme echo chambers because they self select their members. Arguably much of social media often becomes echo chambers as people self select what they want to see. But if you then add in secret invite only clubs you're creating echo chambers within echo chambers.
Beware the alure of exclusivity, it can be false gold.
The way a lot of dot-com startups work, they have high fixed costs -- stuff you pay no matter how many users you have, like programmers -- and low marginal costs, stuff you pay based on how many users you have.
That means that it's good to be big, because you can spread those fixed costs over many, many users. One programmer writing software used by five hundred million users can make a lot more money than software used by five users. The resulting effect is called economy of scale.
So the typical model is to take in a lot of investor money, operate at a loss, and lose money while offering a very compelling service to grow the userbase as quickly as possible.
Once you're big enough, you can spread your costs around many users, so it's easier to make money. You switch from growing your userbase to making money from it. Because you aren't trying as hard as possible to draw in new users, the service is probably gonna get worse from a user standpoint.
If money becomes tight, then it's harder to get investor dollars to operate at a loss with to grow userbase.
My understanding is that due to elevated interest rates in the post-COVID-19 situation, it's more-costly to get investment money. So that will tend to push companies from the "growth" phase to the "monetization" phase.
That affects a bunch of companies, including Reddit.
"That means that it's good to be big, because you can spread those fixed costs over many, many users. One programmer writing software used by five hundred million users can make a lot more money than software used by five users. So the typical model is to take in a lot of investor money, operate at a loss, and lose money while offering a very compelling service to grow the userbase as quickly as possible.
Once you're big enough, you can spread your costs around many users, so it's easier to make money. You switch from growing your userbase to making money from it. Because you aren't trying as hard as possible to draw in new users, the service is probably gonna get worse from a user standpoint."
This kind of reminds me of how Legos are made. Creating the plastic molds from a molding machine to make a single Lego is extremely expensive, but if you make millions of Legos in mass production it reduces costs to make them dramatically to a point where the Lego Group has basically no operating costs to make them anymore. That turns Legos into an investor's dream.
if you make millions of Legos in mass production it reduces costs to make them dramatically to a point where the Lego Group has basically no operating costs to make them anymore
That's how economies of scale work in general, across many, many industries.
On a somewhat related note, your Lego example is more gloriously intricate than you may realize. So, you're spend a lot of money to make a machine to produce Legos at close to zero cost. What happens if someone the next city over thinks they can make a better machine and undercut you?
One way to protect yourself is with the law. You set up intellectual property protection for your Legos and sue everyone who makes "Lehos". This works for a while.
But problems come up. Intellectual property protections have a time limit. They also have a jurisdiction limit, as some guys in a different country, say, Xhina, don't respect your country's laws and start making those Lehos.
What do you do? How does your company survive?
Well, you can leverage the other valuable part of your company, the brand reputation, to do things that Lehos can't, like make deals with other intellectual property holders to make themed Lego sets. So, you strike deals with Disney to make Star Wars and MCU sets, with Warner Brothers for those Harry Potter designs, with Microsoft/Mojang for Minecraft Legos (because they're a perfect fit). That's something that some random plastic injection mold company in China can't do. You're motherfucking Legos, not dipshit Lehos. You can do that, as well as open company stores and theme parks that are tourist destinations.
So, Legos survives, and not just that, but prospers.
Actual Legos are fairly cheap. You can get a box of 790 for $60, which is like $0.07 per Lego. The expensive sets are the licensed sets. They pay for that licensing fee somewhere. A Star Wars themed republic fighter tank is $40 with 262 pieces, which comes to about $0.15 per piece.
Definitely some greed in there but when you're a recognized brand with the ability to license you can get away with that because you already have the contracts so nobody can compete.
This is a great write up, but what I don’t get is why do these companies stick to these idiotic measures instead of turning to their users for help in an open dialogue.
Like, I get that Reddit needs to make profit, and I actually wouldn’t have minded paying for Reddit premium to use my api key with Apollo. Instead Reddit made me and I’d guess a lot of people like me leave and never want to return. Just left with a lingering bitter aftertaste.
Did they think that they wouldn’t get enough funding that way? Well then how about giving it a test run to see if it works? Didn’t work? Well how about asking your users what they might be missing and what they might want to be more happy to subscribe, and adding features/addressing those issues? Working with developers to establish a revenue sharing agreement? There were so many alternative paths.
No, apparently nfts and shitting on your users is where it’s at.
Have a conversation, run polls, A/B test, etc. And be transparent while you’re doing it. These tools are nothing new when developing a service. Why ignore everything?
I mean, is it really just a competence/arrogance thing alone?
I think it's more of an ego thing. The people with healthy egos probably never end up as execs in companies as big as Reddit, and the people that do are likely driven by something else other than the desire to actually build a platform that respects its users and works well in cooperation with them - "I'm smart, I'm sexy, I know better than these plebs making us money".
Yeah, there seems to be an inflection point in the lifecycle of businesses nowadays where the leadership loses any interest in what the company actually does. The products it makes or services it provides are considered almost irrelevant.
Exactly this. Companies like Reddit these days are so disconnected with their userbase it's insane. Of all the millions of things Reddit could do to make their platform a better place, they choose to basically remove the services that everyone liked (the 3rd party apps) and not only that, lie to their users (as with the case of Apollo "blackmailing Reddit for $10 million") and double down on them. It sickens me how ignorant they can be, but I guess that the hard lesson we can all take away is that with money and power comes corruption.
Have a conversation, run polls, A/B test, etc. And be transparent while you’re doing it. These tools are nothing new when developing a service. Why ignore everything?
I mean, based on how dramatic the increasing in price the API was, I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit already knew what the public reaction would be, considering they'll probably also receive considerable hate for even contemplating the decision. Of course they just didn't give a second thought and just went with it.
I stopped using reddit after spez's AmA. If all of this would have been handled in a more mature and open way, I would probably have moved to the reddit app, complained about it for a while, but kept usind reddit. But after what happened in the last weeks, reddit is no longer something I want to be associated with.
For lack of a better description, I simply don't 'like' reddit anymore. It's like a friend who treated you like shit.. Sure, you could still go to a party together and have fun, but it's just not quite the same anymore.
It's not so much about what they did, most people understand reddit has to make money at some point. It's the how that is driving people away imho. At least it is for me.
considering they'll probably also receive considerable hate for even contemplating the decision.
Honestly, when Christian first brought up “maybe subscriptions for Apollo to offset API costs,” I was fine with that. I get that we were receiving a service for free that cost the company money, and I was fine with paying a reasonable amount for that. I just don’t get why they had to make the costs so unreasonable that even subscription based wouldn’t cut it.
I mean after the whole "spez shadow-edited someone else's comment to put words in their mouth" thing, what you're describing sounds a bit too ethical for reddit as a company.
This is not true in most cases.
It's not about being profitable, it's about always making more and more and more and more - the so-called growth.
Let's take the case of reddit inc. Their revenue grew from just $25 million in 2016 to over $500 million in 2022. If they can't make a profit with that, I don't know what to say (I'd say the leadership buys a new ferrari every month, probably). According to this thread, reddit operating costs were around $35k dollars back in 2011. Even if you were to multiply that by a factor of 10, it's still just a couple million dollars per year. Multiply it by 100, and still They. Are. Fucking. Profitable. As. Fuck.
No, the problem is not profitability and paying the bills. Fuck no. The problem is them wanting more than what is remotely reasonable, and of u/spez being a greedy fucking pig and wanting not simply a big, but instead a spectacular cashout in their coming IPO. Well, fuck the greedy little pig boy and fuck reddit.
For some reason Reddit has 2000 employees. That's a huge expense. If I were in charge of Reddit, I think the first thing I'd be doing is conducting those "Exactly what would you say you do here" interviews and figuring out why something that should be a relatively simple and mature forum website needs so many people working on it.
Social media companies are especially doing this whiplash switch from aiming for growing the userbase to making money. And for them, there is another factor that makes it even more important to use money for growth when it is available -- network effect. Basically, for certain services, the role of the service is to facilitate communication between their users. While it's not quite true that all users are equally-likely to communicate with each other -- an elderly user who only speaks Italian and a schoolboy in Kansas who only speaks English might not have a lot of desire to communicate -- in general, users of the service get their value from the service by communicating with each other and each additional user is one more person with whom a user can communicate. This means that it's much more-desirable to use a service with a large userbase than one with a small one, because you can communicate with others. The value of the service as a whole, if everyone were equally likely to communicate with everyone else, rises roughly as the square of the number of users. That's because the value to each user is proportional to the number of users that they can talk to, and that is true for every user -- multiply one by the other, and the value of the service as a whole is proportional to the square of the userbase size.
Social media work by connecting members of their userbase. So for them, they have a huge incentive to use money for growth whenever they can get a hold of it as far as they can.
The services that are especially likely to respond to capital being cheaply available are companies that have a business model that does this, even moreso than a typical dot-com. And sure enough -- Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube derive their value from connecting members of their userbase, rely on network effect as well as economies of scale. And just as they dive really deeply into spending cheap money to grow when they could, when money ceases to be really cheaply available, so they will have further to swim out when it ceases to be.
My understanding is that due to elevated interest rates in the post-COVID-19 situation, it's more-costly to get investment money. So that will tend to push companies from the "growth" phase to the "monetization" phase.
This is basic economics. Increased interest rates mean companies will pay more for every dollar they borrow. This includes venture capital. Cheap borrowing is one of the reasons real estate values skyrocketed over the course of the past generation. Cheap money increased demand, and inflated costs. Do this long enough (maybe an economic collapse or recession between), and the house you bought in 1980 for $50k is now worth $400k.
Every company utilizes borrowing a lot more than you might think. From infrastructure, to payroll, borrowing money plays part in most activities of a company. It's pretty complex.
If by won you mean cause controversy, drive away some users, and allienate most of those staying than Mission Accomplished. Nothing positive happened for Reddit out of this.
Really? Reddit retained about 98% of its users and gained full control of the app market. I’d call that a success for them. They got exactly what they wanted.
They solidified the establishment of competing services (kbin, Lemmy). Many of us would've never even considered using them otherwise. It may not have hurt them a ton in the short term, but they've helped set up their competition.
The users aren’t the value in reddit, it’s the content creators and savvy community members that respond to questions and leave useful content in their own right. Reddit lost a number of those, and those users are forming the nucleus of their demise.
I'd also say the brand reputation has taken a pretty decent hit with their awful handling of the situation. With an upcoming IPO you think they would have handled it carefully but they just seemingly YOLO'd it
RedditMigration
Hot
This magazine is not receiving updates.