First all the bs with Twitter and Elon, then Reddit having an exodus to Lemmy (not complaining lol), then Twitch. Are we like, in an alternate self healing dimension or something?
This Lemmy migration does feel like waaaaay more positive of a result than I ever expected from reddit getting worse.
I’ve always appreciated the idea of the fediverse, but mastodon and the twitter-style of social media has never appealed to me, and Lemmy used to be so tiny and niche, so I didn’t invest much time in it until now. But this sure is nice, comparatively. I’m probably on here too much though!
Same. Never cared about Twitter, but I like new internet stuff, so I got on Mastodon. Never used it and forgot about it for years. Came back to it with all the Elon stuff and realized the instance was dead, so I created a new account on another instance to never use. The point is, like you said, Lemmy is something I will actually use if the community continues to grow and sticks around.
Mastodon has a place, just isn’t for some people. I found the same problem you had with it. Just like how conversations work better in a Reddit-like style of communicating.
Agree with you on this! The migration was super smooth, and even tho, its still quiet small comparative to reddit… It seems to be growing quickly, and seems pretty polished for something in such infancy
I think we do have a sufficient number of users now to keep going irrespective of how reddit fares. Communities are beginning to form and even if there is no futher mass exodus from reddit, I think Lemmy will be fine and will see organic growth over time.
I’ve already noticed I’m spending more time of Lemmy than reddit since the past few days.
It’s easier to spend time on Lemmy for me because the comments are actually worth reading. Seems like the type of person who’s drawn here are actually interested in holding a conversation vs. reddit where it’s about saying something witty or whatever to get them upvotes
They saw Lemmy becoming successful, corporate mistook Lemmy with Lemmings, and decided to go out Lemmings style.
…jokes aside, Cory Doctorow has a great text about that, called “Tiktok’s enshittification”. It’s a four-steps process:
- The platform is good for its users.
- The platform abuses the users, to be good for its business customers.
- The platform abuses the business customers, to claw back all value for itself.
- The platform dies.
In my opinion it’s also the result of management being disconnected from the platform that it manages, and not knowing fully the implications of their own decisions.
Was going link this.
Really great article. I’ve been hearing about it for a while, but finally managed to read through it fully. Very well thought out and a brilliant write-up IMO.
You beat me to it, the man is an oracle.
Some people have come up with the word “enshittification” to describe the basic cycle of modern web services.
The cycle consists of three parts:
- You make the service that attracts new users by providing what they want. Often you do that at a loss, because your goal is to gain a big enough userbase for steps 2 and 3.
- Once there’s enough users, you shift to attracting commercial interests instead – vendors if you’re running a store, advertisers or celebrities or other “big clients” if you’re a social network, etc.
- Once both users and commercial interests are hooked, you can start tightening all the rules and switching completely to profiting yourself and your shareholders.
I am under the impression that the term was popularized, if not invented, by Cory Doctorow. See his many writings on his ad & tracker-free website; https://pluralistic.net/tag/enshittification/
Wiktionary gives him the invention credit (although its source does seem to be KnowYourMeme).
The bestest of sources.
I disagree, we all know that any article that cites the onion is 100% infallibly correct 100% of the time
That is a spectacular definition though! Spot on!
All these websites have almost always been net cash flow negative. They bleed venture capital to provide a service below cost in order to build a user base.
The problem now is interest rates have spiked. Rates have been basically zilch for much of the internet’s history over the past 20+ years, so sites could actually operate for quite some time on super cheap debt that they almost never had to repay. And venture capital firms would just keep pouring money into the “next best thing”.
Now that debt is rapidly becoming much more expensive to maintain, and those VC investors want their chunk of the pie back in their pockets. And they are going to extract it from every single one of these centralized services by whatever force is necessary. It’s only just getting started, you watch.
Note that they are cashflow negative because of expensive advertising features.
Twitter is pretty cheap to run for base functionality and if you open up dev console and see all of the resources Twitter is requesting its like 90% ad stuff and suggestions.
That’s just bandwidth, though. What about database load? A big part of Lemmy’s growing pains come from slow database queries. It doesn’t take much bandwidth to send you the content, but the server has to do a lot of work to figure out which content to send you.
Every request is tied to some functionality. Databases and storage is laughably cheap these days.
The complex queries and all the overhead features is where the real expense is. Crafting a personal, ad-optimized timelines is what’s costing Twitter the most money. The public/subscribed feeds of mastodon are incredibly efficient even on something super slow like ruby on rails.
Lemmy is having the same problem and doesn’t have ads.
Does it though? This instance has thousands of users and interactions already and is running on just few dollars a month.
It’s running on a few hundred dollars a month, if I recall correctly, and it has only about 450 users per day. (The sidebar statistics don’t include a figure for peak concurrent users, unfortunately, and that’s what we really need to know.)
Ah didnt see that increase though decentralized systems are inheritly very inefficient unfortunately
But advertising is also where 90% of their revenue comes from- so really, given the service is “free”, what is the product?
Maga hats
You can’t lose money forever, not as a business. What’s great about the Fediverse is that it makes social media something that can be done as a hobbyist project. Money is nice, but the hobbyist isn’t necessarily out to make money.
The line has to go up.
The issue is that big companies have shareholders, and those shareholders don’t demand that the company stay solvent, but that they achieve year-over-year growth. Even minimal growth like 2-3% over LY is considered a failure to most shareholder groups, depending on the size of the company. So eventually they have to squeeze every last drop out of the userbase/product to keep the line going up, so shareholders don’t sell and bail.
Now, with Twitter there’s a whole litany of poitical tin-foil hat theories I can shout out, but this isn’t the place for it.
Reddit, Facebook, and Twitch: it’s money.
Reddit is getting as much money as it can shored up with Venture Capital before it brings out it’s Initial Public Offering (basically going public for people to buy stock in). High IPO, more perceived value, more space for advertisers, people are going to buy in. EDIT: I believe this is why they’re making their API pricing so high (hence the whole current Reddit situation right now) so that they can get more ads viewed.
Facebook: I don’t even know why people use FB, but im going to guess it’s just ads.
Twitch: Again, Ad revenue. Slam as many first-party ads as you can so you get the money from advertisers. Keep the space clean and homogenized so Pepsi doesn’t feel bad about putting ads in a video before a hot-tub streamer. (not that they’re a bad thing, just using an example)
Everything comes down to the line. And it has to keep going up.
Just to add my thoughts to your Facebook point:
I don’t use Facebook much but I do have an account for the sake of keeping connected to distant family I’d otherwise never speak to again. The rare occasion I’m directly contacted and open the app to see what’s up, legitimately every other post, sometimes several in a row, is some kind of ad or sponsernd Post. Legitimately my entire timeline is one massive ad reel, I cannot fathom how people keep using the platform. Literally anything else would be better
Maybe its a feature, not a flaw.
Maybe Facebook is not only for connecting with family and friends, but also for shopping (ads)
Lol, never seen someone justify ads as such, gave me a chuckle
It’s pretty bad, the content you want to see the least is what’s always at the top of your feed. It’s like they are intentionally trying to piss you off.
Facebook: Mainly because of Facebook groups. They’re pretty whacky, have a lot of fun normie non-degenerate drama, and a well moderated facebook group is more wholesome than any reddit sub in my experience.
It is relaxing to not have the hivemind like reddit or having users constantly one-up each other like twitter. Also wayyy less bot accounts in Facebook groups.
Although it is declining because of FB’s shitty censors and bans, the group scenes are very much alive and fun.
Yep, i have Facebook for groups, events, and also local services.
Oh yeah I forgot about the Local Events and Services part. and Marketplace.
I don’t think there is any replacement for FB in local event organisation. And with how crap google is rn, it is much easier to search facebook marketplace for local services and have a better outcome.
Keep the space clean and homogenized so Pepsi doesn’t feel bad about putting ads in a video before a hot-tub streamer. (not that they’re a bad thing, just using an example)>
Oh it totally is a bad thing. They show women in an oversexualized lewd context to a target audience that consists to signifact extent of children. Don’t misunderstand this as moralism. I’m not coming from a conservative perspective that wants women to be all buttoned up or something. I’m just being critical of a company normalizing the objectification of women (or anyone) to children for the purpose of making money.
I may have worded it wrong (mainly because morning coffee takes forever to hit me). I meant to say that I don’t think those hot-tub streamers are bad because of what they do, I just don’t think they belong on Twitch.
Surely wouldn’t it be easier for them to just inject ads into the API and keep it cheap?
IF that’s something they can do? I don’t know. I don’t know a thing about backend work on third-party programs.
There’s a part of the that thinks Reddit is the same way and just went “Hell with it, use us or nothing at all” and nukes the whole API except for the big-rollers.
I wouldn’t even know who would pay such a high price for that anyway, outside of advertisers and algorithm scrapers.
It is possible for them to return sponsored posts via the API.
Apps will request something like “Give me the first 100 posts from the subreddit /r/aww, using the sorting Hot”. And then Reddit can return 95 actual posts with sponsored posts sprinkled in between every so often.
I don’t think all that many redditors are moving to Lemmy. Judging by the stats on join-lemmy, there are only several thousand monthly Lemmy users, which is nothing compared to reddit which had tens of millions daily users
When I joined lemmy.ml and beehaw.org, the stats on join-lemmy.org were just over 100/month.
Now it’s at 1K/month for beehaw and 1.6K/month for lemmy.ml
There’s also a HUGE list now, where as when I joined last week there were maybe 8?
Small numbers, ya, but Reddit still hasn’t done anything. I am sure July 1st will bring a huge wave of people who are still sticking with Reddit since apps still work.
I came here from Reddit in preparation for it getting whack… ready to make a jump to something closer to how old school reddit was. I think we’ll see a lot more people who are like minded coming over too.
@Dandylion @JshKlsn @technology I’m interested in a Fediverse Reddit alternative. I’m familiar with Lemmy as a software project, but not as a community. Beehaw is totally new to me.
What are these projects aiming for community-wise? What is needed to help them grow?
And critically: Who is paying hosting costs and handling DMCA issues?
I cannot answer most of your questions, as I don’t know.
And critically: Who is paying hosting costs and handling DMCA issues?
The hosting costs are paid by the instance host. As of now, servers are community funded. This doesn’t seem like a viable long term solution, as people hate paying, but hate ads. Unfortunately one of them has to be done.
DMCA is also unknown to me. I guess it would be the admins of the instance the copyrighted content is hosted on? however, given the fact there’s nothing stopping an instance from being hosted in a different country, similar to pirate websites, I don’t know if there’s anything stopping or enforcing that stuff? I mean, from a legal standpoint. Sure, admins might not want their instance being full of piracy, but that would be more of a morality thing.
One cool thing about decentralization is the higher costs incurred to copyright trolls. No longer can they comb through a single corp platform raising the alarm on violations, they’ll have to spend some effort searching wider, sometimes dealing with uncooperative admins, hydra effect within the same fed network, etc. I can see forces pulling in both directions, not sure where it’ll land.
Imho hosting costs, community moderation, federation politics are the larger elephants in the room. Copyright has always been just a suggestion, the huge platforms are the exception.
A DMCA method, Privacy Policy and even a TOS is what is needed to make me feel more comfortable here. Right now, you have no idea what the plan is for your data (and its rentention), data collection, etc. I might dig into the lemmy code and see if I can sus it out myself if I have time.
I feel like reddit power users are the only ones who might switch, normal people simply won’t care. However, power users are already well aware of the coming changes, and have likely already looked for alternates by this point.
Ive seen so many reddit posts on where people are like “what’s wrong with the official reddit app, it’s all I’ve ever used”… Lemmy is much better than the official reddit experience - the issue is most niche communities that exist on Reddit have ~1-5 subscribers here, makes it kind of a hard sell.
Personally i’d way rather be in a small community filled with frequent commenters and posters than a big one where all you see is reposts and ads, however.
Exactly this. I moved from Digg to Reddit ~14 years ago and mostly participate in the smaller/ niche communities on Reddit. I’m switching over to Lemmy and it reminds me of what Reddit used to be like.
I mean, power users make most interesting content, so i can easily imagine regular users just naturally getting, like, bored.
Counting methods are probably different, Lemmy stats only count users that posted at least once in the interval. I assume Reddit counts anyone who opens the site.
The Twitter exodus (which is still limited) was because all of the problems at Twitter were sudden. Huge staff cuts meant lower quality, way more bots, and of course, the owner’s mercurial impulses.
Reddit is a bit different. It’s more of a boiled frog situation. A little tweak here, a little change there, all definitely for the worse (and Reddit is going down hill) but so far nothing seismic. Even the number of users affected by the third party apps thing is pretty small because most users just looking at memes and sharing news just use the native app (my wife does).
I’m not sure whether that really results in an exodus.
Look at Amazon: it just gets worse and worse, but have people stopped buying from it en masse? Nope. It’s getting worse, but ever so slowly.
To be clear, I like it better here, but I do not want an exodus of any type. I want slow migration to help the platform grow more organically and for people to see a polished experience.
People won’t come back if they show up once, interact with this not-pretty-but-functional site and don’t like it. So I’d rather wait for the influx of users to be at a later time tbh.
The trick is to have enough of an interest from enthusiasts now to “prime the pump” so when the general population comes over there is enough to keep them here.
It sort of reminds me of the Digg exodus. Reddit was a much smaller site than Digg yet there were many instances of Digg users reposting things from Reddit since the community had quality content despite it’s small size. The Digg redesign only accelerated the migration.
Well right now lemmy is beefing itself up ready for a predict wave a people moving from reddit to lemmy due to the blackout. Now how many of those people stay and how many return to reddit is a different question. Few of us are moving right now, since you’d have to be involved in reddit communities more. But we will see how many people move on the 12th etc
I agree. A few more people will learn about Lemmy and come over, but to call it an exodus is probably nowhere near accurate. I just don’t think most people care enough. Yes Reddit will suffer. I’m just not convinced Lemmy will benefit that much.
That said, I think we will benefit in the sense that there will now be enough people to sustain some nice communities.
Disclaimer: I’m new here, so obviously talking somewhat out of my lower bode parts here.
Reddit may not even suffer if it primarily loses users that browse with third party apps or on desktop with adblock. That would be a net benefit for reddit based on average revenue per user.
That’s fair to point out, but it implies the only utility users provide to the site is ad impressions. I see a couple of reasons this is not the case.
Mods make up a tiny portion of users but are disproportionately 3rd party app users and rely on 3rd party tools. But if any meaningful portion of the mod community leaves? The remainder were going to have a much bigger job without the tools. To attempt the bigger job with a smaller workforce is a double-whammy. Their only option will be to focus on their favorite subs and elevate more members to mods. The inevitable result will be experienced mods being far outnumbered by new mods, all of whom will have to stick to tedious tasks for subs to not be overrun by spam and hate speech. It’s hard not to predict the same result as what’s happened to Twitter’s content.
Now consider nsfw content, which has always made up a huge chunk of reddit’s traffic. Moderation is even more difficult there to begin with and could easily melt down for the same reasons, even setting aside reddit’s growing distaste for it. Reddit is largely young and male and while many users may have no interest in it, the combination of nsfw imgur links going dead, moderation challenges, and the likelihood of reddit cracking down on nsfw is a combination that may cause reddit to be less attractive for many of the young, male userbase to visit.
I think your point still has merit - reddit won’t miss many of the users seeking alternatives. I would say reddit’s casual “I didn’t even know there were 3rd party apps / old.reddit.com” users are also likely to be turned off by the ultimate results of their changes.
Oh, that’s a point. Do third party apps not show those sponsored posts that look like a discussion, but are actually an ad?
I can’t comment on if they do or not as I exclusively use(d) Syncpro, but there are still loads of “real” posts that are blatant marketing attempts that get posted.
I will confirm that I don’t see sponsored content using a third party app and RES.
I use Infinity (for Reddit), and I don’t see any sponsored posts
RIF is Fun does not show sponsored posts.
I think the Lemmy userbase stands to gain much, while Reddit Inc probably won’t feel a gut stabbing loss.
I commented similarly elsewhere, but the “power user” content creator types on Reddit actively avoid r/all for being a dumpster fire. This disconnects them from the fact that there is an absolutely massive userbase on Reddit who scroll the frontpage and keep coming back to that low quality content.
When power users threaten with “if we leave who will create content?” they are not understanding that their content isn’t relevant. R/all is full of low quality reposts, and political ragebait. My own original content probably cracked about 4K upvotes at highest. It was never going to go to the frontpage. When I deleted it, frontpage users never noticed.
That kind of content is more fit for smaller spaces that have not become the self perpetuating juggernaut that the Reddit front page is.
Lemmy and other sites will gain the quality from exiting power users, and Reddit Inc won’t feel it in the way they care about.
I guess the question is: Do you care more about having a good online experience and not thinking about Reddit, or about burning Reddit to the ground? Because the later I don’t think happens from an exodus.
Oh, I’m not saying it’s not good for us (or maybe I did. Badly worded in that case). I just don’t think Reddit cares or will notice to be honest.
I think we are agreeing in high view concept, just expressing it differently.
Everybody just wants money now. Some of that is reasonable, these companies tend to work if not with a loss, then with quite unpredictable margins.
Now that tech investors have found a new bubble - AI - they are no longer willing to sponsor old-fashion internet stuff and wait if it ever turns a profit.
Especially since many got used to becoming all that richer during the pandemic, and are looking to keep those numbers rising.
But there’s also some sudden hatred of porn, and I don’t know where that is coming from. Tumblr, Imgur have limited it completely, OF wanted to, Reddit probably will, coedcherry shut down. The owner of coedcherry said it was really a sudden 180° turn of the banks to no longer wanting to do anything with porn, and nobody knows why.
It’s especially bizzare considering how these platforms keep assuring us that we’ll still be able to post and see blown off heads and all kinds of other nasty stuff, it’s just the titties that are being banned! Eh?
The porn thing comes from sex trafficking. No one wants to be caught accidentally financing it (as no one would ever want to because it’s Fucking horrible).
Well shit. Still weird tho that banks are willing to leave so much money on the table. Not like there’s any conscience in those institutions.
They really just care about their image
Yup, and want to avoid making the government big mad.
What’s the difference between banks and governments tho?
The CEO
I’m sure the rise of Evangelism in the US doesn’t help
I believe the porn thing is one specific religiously motivated American group pressuring banks and paying processors
It does feel like it.
It’s also a good excuse to introduce ever more surveillance. “To protect the children.”
this article might interest you: Puritanism took over online fandom — and then came for the rest of the internet
Interesting. There is some merit to it, now that I think about it, there has been some discourse regarding raunchy content in fiction.
But I also find it hard to believe that there can be any strong relation between that and the larger push against anything AC in laws, regulations and from places like banks.
Unless it’s something ironic - such as the people with enough influence being those who enjoy the content and being insulted by the pushback, so they decide to just destroy the fun for everybody. Considering how often we learn about the most adamant anti-XY regulators engaging in said XY, that actually make some sense. Just a throught though.
Regardless, it’s weird. And it’s also extremely counter productive. Vilifying stuff like that only cases people who enjoy such content to dig themselves deeper underground. Which is a common line when it comes to all kinds of bans and cancelations.
Dont use banks and cards. Porn and monero were meant to be.
I have a sinking feeling that these moves are not about money, but more about power and manipulation. If you squeeze these user bases such that the savviest users are forced out, those more likely to ask “Why?” about damn near anything, you will own access to a group of people that can be influenced to think/do/buy whatever the top management and/or majority shareholders want. If you lose a few million users, what does it matter if they were dissidents to your goals?
The valuation of a lot of these sites was grossly inflated by the market, so when the largest shareholders saw their billions halve and know what the future holds, they start doing things to temporarily boost their profit margins and sell off the company.
Outside social media, we also have Netflix pulling their own BS, and then lesser know sites/services that are near and dear to me are RARBG shutting down and Mullvad VPN removing port forwarding on July 1st. It’s been a rough month for me in my little online sphere.
I don’t think Mullvad’s port forwarding decision can be compared to Reddit’s greed. They were getting in trouble with law enforcement for providing tunnels to illegal websites, so they had to either identify those customers or stop port forwarding if they didn’t want to get the entire company shut down.
Not technical enough for this one. What does port forwarding allow a user to do that they don’t achieve using regular VPN setup?
@Viktorian@beehaw.org has a good in-depth answer, but the TL;DR non-technical answer is that when you connect to a website, your browser requests the website data from the server the website is running on, which allows you to get information about this server like its location and service provider. This way, you can find out the identity of a website’s owner. With port forwarding, the website admin can pass the website data through Mullvad’s servers instead, so the it looks like the server running the website is Mullvad’s and the true identity of the host server is unknown. Law enforcement was pressuring Mullvad to reveal the information about the hosts of illegal websites, which Mullvad refused to give, so they decided to shut down this service instead.
It enables incoming connections for devices in a NAT (i.e. for devices that all share the same IP address like in a VPN for example). Say your iPhone and your Laptop are both using your local wifi, then they both share the same public IP of your router. If I try to reach your laptop specifically, I have no way of telling your router to send my request to your laptop instead of your iPhone or the router itself. You can now tell your router to forward port 80 for example to your laptop specifically, so if I send a request to your public IP address on port 80, the router knows to forward it to your laptop.
Without port forwarding, only your PC can open connections to servers and only then can servers send data back to your PC (because the router keeps track of open connections and “temporarily” forwards the port of your open connection to you).
If you wish to run a website for example, you need to have ports forwarded. And torrenting works a lot better with it as well because people can contact you to send you the data you’re looking for. Otherwise you’d have to ask everybody by yourself, so to speak. And it’s more effective to “leave a note” for others to find and then contact you based on, because some of the peers might not want to be contacted or don’t have forwarded ports themselves.
Getting a bit more technical, “ports” are a transport layer (layer 4) concept. Other protocols may use different addressing schemes on top of the IP addresses, but most common ones like TCP and UDP for example use ports.
Yeah I didn’t mean to make it sound like they did it due to greed just that it’s been a rough few weeks with online staples (for me) closing or making major changes over last few weeks.
Damn it. Rarbg going down hurts so bad. 😭
The timeline split after harambe. This is known
On one hand, I can name sites that, in 2023, either screwed over their user base, or just went under.
- Teknik (obscure file host/git repo host)
- Enjin (forum host for clans/everyone and their dogs’ minecraft servers, rebranded to peddle NFTs)
- Imgur (currently scrubbing their servers of anonymous uploads/nsfw content)
- Discord (changing their username system to a bad one)
- Reddit (charging exorbitant prices for their api; $20m per year for Apollo’s developer)
I have been considering a domain name to access hypothetical home servers as of late, just so I don’t have to worry about shit like this.
Zippyshare went under too
:O how?
It’s services were dropped a couple of weeks ago
If you’re interested, I wrote about some of the things I moved to self-host on my blog; https://blog.aaronbieber.com/2022/11/20/the-rise-of-the-indie-web.html
I recommend checking out https://indieweb.org/ as well!
Enjin has completely shut down.
I didnt even realize Enjin went down.
twitter was overvalued. reddit has made a lot of questionable business decisions over the last decade or so but their recent API change will be their death knell. it feel like a cash grab. I personally only use Twitch to watch Bob Ross reruns :P
Although there’s a lot of protesting going on over at Reddit right now, I really don’t think it can be compared to twitter. 6 months from now, I doubt things will be all that different at Reddit. A small number of users (relatively speaking when compared to their total number of users) will leave, and that’s probably it.
That’s my guess. I started on old Reddit 10+ years ago, but now use only the first party apps. They’re clunky and sluggish, but good enough if you just want your doom scrolling fix.
I’m glad this drama alerted me to Lemmy, though. I probably would have joined one sooner had I known about them.
But… why
Don’t forget that Reddit has invested almost nothing into good moderation tools, and most medium to large subreddits use third party tools (that use the API) to moderate.
This means moderating a subreddit will either be extremely difficult (by using the official apps and website), or moderators will literally have to pay reddit to moderate a subreddit. For larger raids or groups of spambots, those costs will quickly add up.
I think things will be very different on reddit after the change, although still not entirely comparable to twitter.
Reddit has announced they are making an API access exception for apps devoted to accessibility. They will have to do the same for moderation tools.
idk, if all the 3rd party apps can no longer afford to keep running, they’ll either need to shut down or switch to Lemmy, and those apps have many many users
honestly would be pretty insane to open up RIF (or whatever 3rd party reddit app you use) and there’s an announcement saying this is a Lemmy app now lol, I wonder how many users that could pull
honestly would be pretty insane to open up RIF (or whatever 3rd party reddit app you use) and there’s an announcement saying this is a Lemmy app now lol, I wonder how many users that could pull
Is that legal? or if not illegal, is that allowed by the play/app store?
Seems against the rules to just build up a user base for Site A, and then flip a switch behind the scenes to now serve all data from Site B.
What they can do, is just put a notice to download their new LIF (lemmy is fun) app when you open the RIF app. Kinda like what Tweetbot did. When you opened their app, it talked about getting a refund, or asked if you wanted to transfer your pro subscription to Ivory for Mastodon.
I’m fairly sure that much traffic would smother Lemmy
They could make their own instances, but idk how much money those apps pull in
Depends on whether Reddit deletes NSFW content once they go public
Facebook dies due to privacy concerns and misinformation. Twitter under threat because Elon. Imgur just deleted their NSFW content. Reddit with its API pricing. Twitch executives also getting greedy. Youtube has been going down for years.
It feels like we’re seeing the natural life-cycle of social media companies in real time.
TikTok might be the next
I very much like the community aspect of TikTok; is there anyone working on a Fediverse alternative to it? Or perhaps adding its features to PeerTube?
One can only hope.
TikTok is literally owned by China.
Discord’s been going very downhill for years, and recently made a wider known awful change (although not too impactful). Wonder when they will be going too far with things like “Mee6” and “Nitro”.
What did Discord change?
They are changing the way usernames are being handled. Instead of letting them be whatever you want with the identifying tag after it, they are requiring it to be a unique username
Oh right, that change. I personally didn’t think that was a big deal. Instead of having Username#1234 now you might have Username_1234. What am I missing?
It’s one of those “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” kind of changes. It’s just a weird one to suddenly push onto a platform, especially when the previous solution is better in every single way
True. But I can somewhat understand why they’re changing it. When they started working on Discord they probably didn’t think it would blow up the way it did. The use of the discriminator is probably a bit confusing for some less tech savvy people. And @username has pretty much become the standard everywhere 🤷♂️
Someone pointed it out to me recently the discriminator probably isn’t the driver for the change. The real driver is they committed a very dumb mistake originally, with regards to capitalization in usernames.
For example, in Discord the user names Hyperz, HyperZ, hyperz, hyperZ, HYperz, etc… can all be distinct usernames.
I feel like if discord just did a better job of explaining it, then there wouldn’t be any problem. I’ve heard it’s a problem for content creators as well because they could remain semi anonymous by being pewdiepie#6381 but now they have to be @pewdiepie and actively claim that or else it sells on markets for thousands. That’s another problem, now username sellers will be a thing, when they weren’t before. Personally I’m kind of upset by this change. If it was about the weird ASCII characters people have in their names, why not restrict it. Most people don’t have them so they would be unaffected.
