With Threads/Meta heading for the fediverse, and Tumblr looking at ActivityPub, how would you feel if Reddit decided to add support and federate Kbin & Lemmy?
Is it even possible?
If so is it likely it even inevitable?
@seacocker Anything is possible
It’s possible but it’d be a substantial time and cost investment on their part.
Reddit thinks its super valuable asset is the lump of data (about 2TB) consisting of archived text that users have posted. They want to sell it for AI training. Meta is more about surveillance, so different incentives. Of course the Reddit archive through 2022(?) is already downloadable via the PushShift torrent, oops.
I suspect the weird recurring memes that require decade old knowledge of the platform to fully understand is going to create some “quirky” AI hallucinations
Maybe what they really want to sell is more like the Twitter firehose feed, for real-time sentiment analysis and market predictions. I’m not happy that Lemmy gives that out at all, but I don’t see a good way to prevent it. I think interesting communities will eventually have to go private.
Giving it out free devalues those trying to profit from the same product. And if it’s free, open source platforms can benefit too.
My I’m feeling optimistic tonight.
I’m in the defederate-with-all-corporations camp. I perceive the goal to be maintaining our own independent identity here as much as possible until our independent Fediverse userbase gets into the millions, at which point we will be large enough to maintain relevance even in the face of heavy-handed competition.
It is theoretically possible for them to go ActivityPub, but I rather doubt they will any time soon. Their strategy towards us so far seems to be to pretend we don’t exist, which isn’t working terribly well so far, but they’re invested I guess…?
I expect Zuck to be a little more planned in his dealing with us. Us growing doesn’t hurt him, so long as it doesn’t happen at his expense. If it does, either some marketing and algorithm tweaks could fix that. If we grow too large and become potentially able to compete with him, he can always purchase individual large Instances from their owners. That is neither illegal nor even unethical.
edit: Forgot this was about reddit at the end there. I think they’re going to slowly dwindle, unless they get someone more visionary in there.
Don’t federate with corporations that habitually collect your data to use it against you. Reddit, Meta, Google, doesn’t matter.
I’d hope most instances would defederate with them.
exploding-heads obviously wouldn’t. Kindred spirits.
Well, all what they did and do focuses on showing some formal growth and potential for the IPO. I could imagine they can say that they will also support activepub if experts will decide that this helps with the IPO
I think it’s more realistic than people think. The Digital Markets Act in the EU is likely why Threads is ActivityPub, and Reddit is (potentially) affected by it too: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-and-open-digital-markets_en
Examples of the “do’s” - Gatekeeper platforms will have to:
- allow third parties to inter-operate with the gatekeeper’s own services in certain specific situations
- allow their business users to access the data that they generate in their use of the gatekeeper’s platform
- provide companies advertising on their platform with the tools and information necessary for advertisers and publishers to carry out their own independent verification of their advertisements hosted by the gatekeeper
- allow their business users to promote their offer and conclude contracts with their customers outside the gatekeeper’s platform
Let me quickly quote selected sections of the act itself:
The lack of interoperability allows gatekeepers that provide number-independent interpersonal communications services to benefit from strong network effects, which contributes to the weakening of contestability. Furthermore, regardless of whether end users ‘multi-home’, gatekeepers often provide number-independent interpersonal communications services as part of their platform ecosystem, and this further exacerbates entry barriers for alternative providers of such services and increases costs for end users to switch. Without prejudice to Directive (EU) 2018/1972 of the European Parliament and of the Council (14) and, in particular, the conditions and procedures laid down in Article 61 thereof, gatekeepers should therefore ensure, free of charge and upon request, interoperability with certain basic functionalities of their number-independent interpersonal communications services that they provide to their own end users, to third-party providers of such services.
Gatekeepers should ensure interoperability for third-party providers of number-independent interpersonal communications services that offer or intend to offer their number-independent interpersonal communications services to end users and business users in the Union. To facilitate the practical implementation of such interoperability, the gatekeeper concerned should be required to publish a reference offer laying down the technical details and general terms and conditions of interoperability with its number-independent interpersonal communications services. It should be possible for the Commission, if applicable, to consult the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications, in order to determine whether the technical details and the general terms and conditions published in the reference offer that the gatekeeper intends to implement or has implemented ensures compliance with this obligation.
Simply:
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You need to allow third-party apps free of charge
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You must publish your API publicly
Failure to comply causes:
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Initial fine of up to 10% of the company’s total worldwide annual turnover (or up to 20% in the event of repeated infringements)
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Daily fine of up to 5% of the average daily turnover
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Systemic infringements can cause the EU to break up the company entirely
The law has teeth. It could be I’m misunderstanding some nuances of the text, but this part seems pretty cut and dry from my perspective (I am not a legal expert):
gatekeepers should therefore ensure, free of charge and upon request, interoperability with certain basic functionalities of their number-independent interpersonal communications services that they provide to their own end users, to third-party providers of such services.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_communication
Interpersonal communication is an exchange of information between two or more people.
If deemed an internet gatekeeper, Reddit would need to allow interoperability free of charge with all of their “interpersonal communications services” (e.g. Reddit + chat + modmail + etc.) on any kind of third-party app that wants to support it. (Which makes recent decisions even more baffling.)
From a cynical perspective, Reddit switching to ActivityPub would also work to remove a barrier between Reddit and Lemmy. If Reddit thinks they can out-compete Lemmy from a UX perspective, reversing course and going more open by embracing ActivityPub would bring traffic back to where they can monetize it. If Reddit’s UX is better, people will be more likely to engage on Reddit than Lemmy, and thus Reddit wouldn’t lose people.
Of course, there are 2 major issues with this:
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Reddit is terrible at UX and is actively getting worse
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Spez is a fuckwad who wants to be Elon without realizing he and Elon are about to be royally fucked by the EU next year when this starts to really take effect
That’s sort of where I was going I guess. Now Meta are involved it’s a buzzword.
Those making decisions about this will not approve of this as there is no immediate business benefit to be seen.
Reddit in 2023 is different that the one it was built upon once upon a time. And fuck u/spez
If Meta does end up Federating, then Reddit would potentially be able to gain 100M (or whatever the latest crazy numbers are) potential viewers of ads disguised as content. That’s a lot of eyeballs to try and make money off of!
For the Lemmy/KBin side, being able to potentially monetize the people that specifically left your shitty platform has to look somewhat appealing.
This would basically mean adding back support for 3rd party apps. Not directly but still. So it won’t happen
That’s not what Reddit is anymore, maybe if this idea was proposed 10 years ago they’d consider it, but it’s just not an open space anymore.
Would be cool though
They’ve just killed off third-party apps no way they’d do this as it just completely undos what they’re trying to achieve + allows users with accounts they don’t even own
