This isn’t the end for Reddit by a long way but it might in hindsight be seen as when its slow decline reached the point of no return.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall at Reddit HQ right now in general!

Reddit’s always had inept management, Spez in particular can’t help but antagonise his users with a daft unforced error every couple of years. We don’t need to ‘win’, we don’t even need to actively do anything but exist. As long as nice places like this exist and Reddit does too Reddit’s inevitable cockups will provide a small but steady trickle of users.

I decided to jump before I was pushed and bin off Apollo the weekend before the strikes started. This place existing made that jump a lot easier I think!

Since the fediverse unlike the rest of the web consists mostly of people hostile to aggressive monetisation there’s a built-in limit to how ‘capitalist’ (in the popular sense rather than the technical sense) an instance can be in terms of funding it. Instances will be forced to find alternative ways to pay the bills to the traditional ‘our users are the commodity we sell’ approach of the corporate social media platforms if they want to stick around for the long run which will be a fantastic thing for the web I think.

This feels a little bit like a Roman asking if we should build a steam turbine. It wasn’t beyond them to make a primitive version (one even existed!) but the necessary science and technology to do anything useful with it wouldn’t exist for a long time yet. Yes we have an idea of how we might potentially go about it but I don’t think it’ll happen until we’re flinging comets about like pool balls across the solar system.

I suspect if we do develop terraforming tech Earth will be the first target as we seek to undo the harm our mode of living has done to the planet.

Yeah lots of people apparently haven’t been in a tech company with the CEO saying ‘everything’s fine’ only to get hit with layoffs shortly either, even if his word was worth more than the square root of fuck-all which we know it’s not he’d be obliged to lie if ad revenue was through the floor.

Also he’s blundered pretty badly but he’s not a moron, that memo was inevitably going to leak and it’s classic strikebreaking tactics to go over the heads of the ‘union reps’ and try to get the ‘workers’ (not sure what the terminology is when nobody’s actually a paid employee) to fight among each other.

To be fair the aim of ads generally isn’t to make you go ‘oh now I’ll go and buy that’, it’s more about unconsciously planting the idea that $product exists so when you actually do want to buy something you buy that brand. It’s why ‘show me as many as you like, ads don’t work on me’ is complete rubbish and the only real solution is blocking them entirely on a personal level and on a social level laws that restrict where and when they may be shown.

A particularly egregious example of psychologically manipulative advertising would be ‘Joe Camel’ who was nominally just a fun mascot but in reality existed to advertise cigarettes to children so they’d buy Camels when they were old enough. Given the prevalence of really awful advertising in the present day Big Tech really does deserve the increasing comparisons with Big Tobacco I think.

If our success depends on Spez not being a knob then our future is already more secure than most.

Can the various servers take it? The one I’m on (BeeHaw) has held up admirably but I’ve heard of others going down with an influx of users.

it seems no-one on Reddit’s leadership team, or anyone egging the company to float, understands what makes their own product tick.

Which is good news for us because even if this does blow over they will fuck up again and every time it happens we’ll profit from it in new users. Spez’s problem isn’t that his dream is unattainable, his problem is that the person having that dream is him.

Aww, I almost feel bad for him. Almost.

As long as neither fork broke compatibility with the underlying protocol you’d still be able to communicate, for example we can federate with Mastodon instances if we want to and that’s a totally different platform other than the fact it also uses ActivityPub.

Yeah Reddit has far too many wannabe Harvey Specters who think ‘anything that’s not prohibited is permitted’ is a challenge rather than a principle. I think how people react to this stance is quite telling sometimes, ‘Moderator discretion’ means ‘moderators can keep your rule-breaking post up if it’s a genuinely good contribution’ as much as it means ‘moderators can remove your posts and ban you arbitrarily’; it’d be a poor start coming to this place not to assume good faith in the moderators especially as most of us are here in response to bad faith on Reddit’s part.

Yeah ‘built in $language’ literally only matters from the point of view of attracting volunteer devs, end users couldn’t care less as long as the platform works. Lemmy and Kbin could be written in Malbolge for all they cared as long as it loads properly and doesn’t annoy them.

While I wouldn’t start a new PHP project myself as it’s yet another language to juggle and not one I’m particularly interested in it’s a perfectly legitimate choice even in 2023.

Modern PHP is supposed to be a decent language these days rather than a collection of footguns so I wouldn’t write it off out of hand. It wouldn’t be my first choice of language but it still runs huge swathes of the web. What it will mean is it’ll be harder for Kbin to attract developers on a voluntary basis I think, if I’m giving my time for free I’d much rather spent it writing Rust than PHP even if PHP is decent these days.

I’m going to have to read up on how the protocol works in detail to be honest before I’d be able to say with any confidence what could and couldn’t be done but that would be a good feature I think. There is much less risk of ‘eternal Septembering’ smaller communities by swamping them with outsiders like /r/all does on Reddit here on Lemmy because affected communities can defederate at will.

The problem is that smaller subs could be Eternal Septembered almost overnight by getting onto /r/all and being swamped by people with no interest in following the established norms. The UK politics sub after Brexit for example was never the same again.

Really impressed with this place and how it’s run so far! I’m a software engineer and I’m currently taking advantage of a cross training programme to get passable at the infrastructure side of things. I’d be happy to donate a weekend or two here and there for the sake of BeeHaw if that’s any use to you? I can’t commit a huge amount of time at the moment but I really like this community and I’ll contribute where I can if it’ll help keep the lights on.

What are the main pain points with Lemmy’s backend? I’ll dive into the code when I get some time and have a poke around to get familiar if nothing else.

Yeah, and a lot of the discussion amounts to ‘this ship has nicer furnishings than the one that sank even if it’s a lot smaller’ as well.