It’s disappointing to see some of the larger subreddits going public with a ‘what’s the point?’ tone. Most are staying private, but some aren’t. As if Reddit doesn’t exist solely because of its user generated content. If enough subs permanently shut down, they’ll be forced to reconsider their API position. Social media can’t run without social media.
I decided to write a message to subreddits I’ve been lurking for years via messaging the mods saying how vitally important it is for subreddits to protest right now, at this critical time, before it’s too late. I’ve politely implored them to continue the protest saying how these API changes with have a long-lasting, permanent impact on Reddit as a platform for the worse.
I’d suggest you guys come up with your own letter template and message the mods of those subreddits in polite form. It’d be great if we can convince these exceptions to go private again. I also understand some moderators may be afraid Reddit will just replace them with mods willing to reopen the sub, so I added a section saying it they’re treated like that, Reddit don’t deserve their time and maybe they should consider spending their time elsewhere if that happens. This is their prime chance to stand up for the right thing right now for the future of Reddit.
I used Reddark to determine which subreddits to contact. I’d say only contact hobbyist ones such as sports rather than more politically-inclined ones like Ukraine that have a fair reason to stay open. Also some subreddits have made poll posts asking their users if they should go private like Gaming and NotTheOnion, so please don’t message those ones.
I think the next move is to direct communities to a new platform, and get the mods on board with it.
Right now I think fediverse is the new platform. The infrastructure needs to be ready to scale though.
Kbin needs to get baseline hardware in place and auto-scaling cloud hardware to deal with the rush and day-to-day fluctuations. This requires money and engineers.
Kbin needs a way to generate some income to help pay for these things. The easiest to sell is ads. If ads don’t show up soon I don’t see this project succeeding. If Kbin can’t scale automatically then it’s going to fail.
Once these issues are addressed then convincing a few large subreddits to redirect their community to fediverse will make it easier to redirect smaller subreddits. It will also make it possible for mobile devs to do their thing.
I think mobile apps should decide if they want to be free and not show ads, or get a cut of ad revenue if they do show kbins ads to their users. People should be compensated for their work.
What do ads have to do with it? Once @ernest sets up a donation page that allows automated, periodic donations, it should be fine. Look at mastodon. They’re pulling 28k/month in donations from patreon alone. Lemmy and kbin are the two biggest contenders for a reddit replacement on the fediverse imo and it’s quite possible they’ll get bigger than mastodon (personal feeling).
They won’t need ad money and if they ever do switch, I can bet you it won’t play well with the community.
It is a bit of a catch-22 though. In its current state both Lemmy and Kbin are not really user friendly, app support is pretty much nonexistent. It would be hard to sell access to this for a few bucks a month. But if the money doesn’t start rolling in early to get ahead of stability and usability problems, it may never get off the ground at all. And we could potentially throw money at it and still have it go nowhere. It’s tricky. I want to tell my (admittedly small) subreddit to jump ship and come over to lemmy.world and kbin.social but I think in its current state they’re liable to look at me like I’ve gone insane. These places aren’t ready to handle the 95+% of Reddit that aren’t relatively tech-savvy power users.
We need:
a wiki equivalent per-community
better discoverability across fediverse aggregators
a more RES-style UI that just makes more sense for the way people are used to browsing (why can’t I go anywhere and see a list of my subscribed communities? kbin, lemmy.world and the Mlem app all can’t do this, but Memmy can, and it’s the one most important thing I want - there’s a reason it’s the opening page of an app like Apollo)
and an app that leans in to the broad discoverability across servers rather than is limited by it. e.g. Mlem can’t see kbin communities. Kbin doesn’t have an app yet.
There was no reason to expect any of this was gonna happen in two days - but I think once those start coming in to focus we can actually pull broad swaths of Reddit communities over with fairly little disruption.
I agree that the UI needs work. I want to point out that you can see a list of all your subscribed communities. On your profile, where it says Overview, threads, comments, etc, these are on a scroll bar. scroll over and there’s a tab labeled subscriptions, and there you can see all your subscribed magazines and how long you’ve been subscribed to them.