- Use distributed, federated services like Lemmy, mastodon etc.
- Support the hosts with our own funds.
- Moderate our own communities.
The second point is the most important. Reddit happened because they are a corporate entity seeking profit. Let’s own our social media platforms by actively contributing funds to them.
Lemmy is not truly distributed at this point, there are few well-known instances which are bearing the load and the rest is just sipping stuff through activitypub subscriptions.
If this thing will become even remotely popular with current architecture they have to follow the same path donations -> commercial or die. Serving a lot of users costs money, serving media content costs even more money. It’s not a problem at the moment, but it will be.ActivityPub is not a magic bullet, it’s just a spec on how servers talk to each other. To truly involve each and every server in sharing the workload there’s a need in something on top of that, or even better - replacing that since w/o active participation of client apps in load balancing it’ll be the same reverse proxy shit in the end.
When communities and users can be migrated, this issue can be somewhat solved
communities
it’s a band-aid, popular instances will be still under pressure to serve end users. Ok, they got the message through push from some other server instead of their user submitting it directly and the instance is not responsible for pushes to community subscribers (which is something, but not much, actually), however in the end it ends up stored locally and users still will be sending requests to popular instance to get their content if they are registered there.
users
not happening. It’s a problem to change even username (and requires federation consensus first implementation-wise, it’s not only lemmy around here), changing user’s server will need fairly complex extension for id redirects or update propagation or something.
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/changeable-usernames/830
In general it’s the same problem with migrating communities - you need to somehow update all the existing subscriptions across the federation.
I hope to be corrected on this, but this doesn’t look too good.I’m not shitting on lemmy and activitypub in general, it’s a step in the right direction, however there are a lot of by-design issues which makes them prone to the very same problems as non-federated websites.
- Never add karma or any “aggregate score” like it. It just feeds bad behavior, farmers, and bots.
This is a point that is weird. Like, I knew it happened but at the same time, Reddit isn’t the kind of place that put much importance over an individual account, so I don’t understand what even the point of having a large account karma really was. Outside of a few niche posters like shitty_watercolours or the poem dude and some of the HQGiffers who always made in-jokes about each other, did people really pay attention to a single user account in any meaningful way?
Yeah no, Reddit is focused on communities rather than individuals, which is a good thing. It’s genuinely hard to become recognizeable on Reddit.
But, number go up. It’s satisfying to get lots of internet points and have them all compiled.
Also a lot of subs have minimum karma required to post so bots would farm content to get there
True, but not a shitpost tho ^^
i used to inhabit forums and bbs that did something similar to reddit and i learned that the downfall will be so slow that no one will be able to recognize it. one of them was still around and i took a look when i left reddit and saw that the die hards remained and now post over 75% of the content.
it’s a bit like climate change; it’s unquestionably happening but most either won’t admit it or just ignore it.
