The recent Threads controversy brought this question to my mind.
It is certain that such a thing will not happen, but if it was in theory; what would your reactions be? Also are your views on this similar to your views on Threads?
Fuck Reddit, Spez is an asshole
It wouldn’t make sense from a business standpoint. Reddit’s content would be accessible through free and open instances which wouldn’t bring traffic through Reddit and their ads. The thing that brought the end of the API and third party Reddit clients in the first place.
Bad bad bad bad bad bad.
I firmly believe that no instance should harbor a large portion of activity on the fediverse, as it makes it difficult for other instances to defederate from them (as users there would lose a massive portion of the content that they see) and easy for them to take users from other instances by just ceasing to federate (as users on other instances would have to go to the large instance to keep the level of activity their used to). And that’s in regards to microblogs like on Mastodon.
With communities, it’d be so much worse.
If Reddit federates, and Lemmy/Kbin instances don’t defederate en masse, almost every active community will be on reddit.com. No reason to post on minecraft@lemmy.world with its 5 posts a week when Minecraft@reddit.com has millions of subscribers and thousands upon thousands of active users. Nearly all activity will go to subreddits, the exceptions being from people who have blocked Reddit or on communities pertaining to non-Reddit platforms/instances (e.g., kbinMeta@kbin.social). And if Reddit defederates after that, the threadiverse will be a ghost town. People are already (and justifiably) concerned that too many people and big communities are on lemmy.world. Just imagine Reddit coming in with all of its users.
If Reddit federates, it’s just gonna straight up be embrace and extinguish — no extend required.
People’s reactions would be even more against it than to Threads for sure. It would also be more dangerous because while Meta has less incentive to destroy the Fediverse (it’s but a blip in their user base), Reddit is not only much smaller but doesn’t have other apps to pull users from. Reddit is just reddit. Reddit would love to eat up the Fediverse if they could.
You already said that it won’t happen but from my understanding, it isn’t possible because the fediverse has a certain protocol and reddit most certainly works differently. Am I right? I don’t want to sound snobbish, I got that’s it’s a thought experiment. I just wondered if I’m correct.
On your question: I think most servers wouldn’t federate but it won’t be as bad as with Threads. I myself wouldn’t be too sure. Maybe I would create a second account on a server that’s federated with reddit but I don’t want my feed to be fluted by it.
Reddit does work differently and they would have to implement the ActivityPub protocol in order to federate, which would be a lot of effort for them.
The bigger thing is, ActivityPub is an API protocol. So for example, by knowing your username and instance I could call a particular API endpoint on your instance and get, just as one example, all your “outbox” messages - everything you have posted, the tags, actors you have sent it to (people or communities), etc. The reason for the large recent Reddit exodus is that they shut down their API because they do not want people to be able to easily pull all their data. So they would absolutely never implement ActivityPub, in my opinion. They want to remain walled off.
I just started browsing here in stead of Reddit because the last ui change just throws recommended trash at me and it’s cluttered. I’m still trying to figure out what this is but it seems like decentralized servers that all link to each other anyway?
Hey welcome! I can recommend to
- checking this post: https://sh.itjust.works/post/24928
- or this image: https://i.imgur.com/b2QuYAR.png
for orientation. Things shouldn’t have changed much for you. I just recommend you to choose a nice mobile app and alternative web UI (listed on your instance sidebar).
I’d leave the Fedivese just like I left reddit. The internet was a mistake.
I would love it. I hate Reddit, I hate the UI, the apps, the ads, etc. Being able to access some of the niche communities that don’t have a presence on Lemmy, on my own terms and without even having a Reddit account? Absolutely.
