Apollo going down is the reason why I’m here on Lemmy. I loved that app as much as I hate ads and I refuse to compromise so I quit cold turkey and never looked back. I’ll do the same for youtube if they ever actually figure out how to combat ad blockers effectively for more than a few hours at a time.

I was using RedReader and last I checked it was still active. Originally I thought I’d still follow the local subreddit but I’ve had zero interest in using Reddit, the people who run it are contemptible.

The bots are why I never looked back. Within an hour posts are flooded with cutesy one-liners. Why would I enjoy conversing with a fucking robot?!

Which leads to the second major issue: …, the subs are apparently all interchangable at this point. … now it’s like the subs don’t even matter: MadeMeSmile-type content is ending up everywhere while meaningless catch-all subs like “r/awesome” are proliferating.

As a long-time user of Vkontakte (VK), the russian Facebook, I’ve seen it here. Big communities oriented towards diferent groups of people became parts of one long human centipede, because average content made them more clicks and views they could then sell to advertisers. With a deteriorating price of ads it meant that’s the only way for them to be afloat, and the feed’s algorhytm favored them.

What admins done next is some sloppy tries at cultivating OC or rather downing the visibility of what they’ve seen as a copied or low-effort content. As mechanics of it were obviously kept in secret, it lead to trial-and-error investigations of how it works and how to evade it. Predictably enough, it was dumb and introduced some unwritten rules for OC creators to be treated like legit posters, while repost farms were first to get the gist of it.

Later, they introduced a random semi-manually approved ‘checkmark’ called Prometheus, with a fire emoji, that they selecrively put onto some communities for a limited time. As it was promoted, it temporally ups the visibility of one’s posts, and it has been verified to boost views to non-subscribers. But, as our classic character Chadsky (!) once said, ‘Who are to judge?’. If anything, it made the favoritistic manipulation even more obvious and left the black box of algorythm a secret to mods who, unlike most subreddit mods, really made it their paid work with hired editors and stuff. It reshuffled the informational landscape and highlighted some small creators, but also brought even more garbage due to what (now admins) see as safe and potentially popular.

I suspect Reddit may try something like that at some point.

once businesses realize their audience is all machines and other advertisers?

It’s like attending one of those trade shows for Mary Kay or Herbalife etc : the only people there are other salespeople, I assume, and once you realize you’re not the consumer but the product, it all starts to feel like a Sunday morning ride home from Vegas.

Hasbarah propaganda is so blatantly obvious there too it’s terminally cringe

It’s been that way for 10 years or so.

I think Lemmy will be OK as long as users take care not to overcentralize.

When Lemmy dies someday it will be for a different pattern, like issues with bots or problems scaling the moderation capacity.

I think a sustainable growth pattern that could help keep this from happening here is one where connected subnetworks of Lemmy servers grow up to a certain point and then eventually split into distinct networks.

There’s a critical mass required before it’s worth corporate and nation-state troll attention. If networks split off from each other before that mass is reached, then they might never get much attention.

Or if they split a bit after that mass is reached, maybe they waste a bunch of resources and never get a good return on that investment and then the critical mass goes up a bit because there’s more risk involved. Plus seeing that shit might make people more receptive of the idea of a split because some still have the idea that more popular = better.

That said, I do see that splitting a network like that won’t be easy to do in a way that doesn’t hurt communities. I’m also not sure how to handle niche communities, other than pointing out that they existed before Reddit was a thing, they weren’t just all concentrated on one website or platform.

i suggest having multiple accounts in many instances especially since i see you are on .world.

if you don’t have one, do it now! :)

my guess (100% vibes-based) is .world might consume another couple comms and split off to its own thing. If i’m even right, how much that split affects lemmy depends on how many and how well we users are spread out over the other comms.

Yeah, that was my thought when many people were talking about how to make Lemmy more popular after the initial exodus. My thought was that Lemmy felt a lot more like the Reddit that first attracted me to the platform over a decade ago than Reddit itself had for years. I thought society had moved beyond being capable of what Reddit and older forums used to be.

I don’t know if it’s because of a subset of people that are awful but only follow crowds, if corporations do things that ruin things once they think they can make money from them, if it’s trolls (for their own entertainment or for sowing division with some kind of a sponsor), or some combination of all of those and others. But whatever it is, Lemmy doesn’t seem to have that yet. Even the instances that largely got defederated by most of the others were better than the Reddit experience while they were still here, and they didn’t stay here for long (plus they still exist, so those who are drawn to that kinda scene can still go there instead of needing to find somewhere else).

Not to mention the bigger the fediverse gets, the more expensive it will be to run servers, which increases the chance that they end up going for sale not because their admins don’t want them anymore but because they can’t afford them.