For what it’s worth, this is exactly how Reddit was in the early days. I remember a niche sub being something that had maybe 30-50 members, now basically every subject has a subreddit with communities in the 5000+ range.

Just give it time. If there is a particular community you’re missing, use this as an opportunity to start it over here and start getting people involved.

My opinion is that if Reddit was really concerned about the preservation of their data, they would keep their API open and encourage 3rd-party interactions with their platform.

I think scrambling your data is not only justified, it’s the correct form of protest.

Well, this particular Magazine is called /m/RedditMigration so it would be kind of hard to not discuss Reddit here…

Does it? I hadn’t noticed, I haven’t been over there in quite a while.

The harshness is intentional because Reddit is gearing up to aim themselves at a new audience. They know that they are going to lose a big chunk of their users - they want that. Those of us who were using third party apps were probably the least convertible in terms of profit.

The mentality is our way or the highway, and in this case they win no matter what because for every one of us they lose, they are going to gain 20x. They want those TikTok numbers, and this is how they plan to get there

Yeah, this is something I thought about as soon as the blackout started. I am in the IT world and as soon as it happened, it got really difficult to find certain bits of crucial information, because those bits of info were stored within Reddit comments.

Anyone in the tech world can tell you that besides Stack Overflow and Github, Reddit is right up there among the most leaned-on tech resources these days. Never before was there a bigger forum of tech people discussing their work. Those results were suddenly, instantly no longer valid, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who noticed that. This is part of why Reddit was scrambling to open subs back up - if more than 2 or 3 weeks went by, Google would have removed those listings from the search.

I’m pretty content with KBin. As time goes on the content level will increase and hopefully remain at a level which makes it easy to curate my feed and reduce noise. Truth be told Reddit has been getting worse for a long time and being here reflects that. This feels a lot like what Reddit felt like 10 years ago.

Oh, are Lemmy and Kbin the only Reddit Alternatives?

After many years of tinkering, I finally gave in and converted my whole stack over to UnRAID a few years ago. You know what? It’s awesome, and I wish I had done it sooner. It automates so many of the more tedious aspects of home server management. I work in IT, so for me it’s less about scratching the itch and more about having competent hosting of services I consider mission-critical. UnRAID lets me do that easily and effectively.

Most of my fun stuff is controlled through Docker and VMs via UnRAID, and I have a secondary external Linux server which handles some tasks I don’t want to saddle UnRAID with (PFSense, Adblocking, etc). The UnRAID server itself has 128GB RAM and dual XEON CPUs, so plenty of go for my home projects. I’m at 12TB right now but I was just on Amazon eyeing some 8TB drives…

This exact situation is why I eventually shut down access to my media server to only my household. I had the same setup for many years and it just got to be a clusterfuck of people messaging me that things were broken, not working how they wanted, need to have more features, aren’t working fast enough, etc. I work in IT. I get enough of that when I’m clocked in, I don’t need it at home too.

Good luck though, OP.

AudioBookShelf is awesome for audiobooks. I can’t speak to its capability as an eReader but I thought I’d throw that out there for anyone wanting a second opinion. I use it daily and the Android app is great too. My go-to audiobook server for life if it stays just like it is right now.

I’ll second Ubooquity. I have a lot of experience with this, as I’ve been self-hosting my eBooks and Audiobooks for many years now. Ubooquity is not perfect, but if you’re willing to tinker with it, you can get it set up pretty nicely. There are themes, and the Plex theme actually makes it look really slick.

Kavita is the new kid on the block for me - I have been testing it out as a general-purpose eReader but I’m not ready to give it my recommendation yet.

I’m sort of regretting not scraping some of the more important tech subs on there before the blackout…some really valuable info could be lost. Hopefully someone else already has that covered.

Of course it won’t shut down.

Reddit can remove the mods of any sub at any time and simply open the subs back up. They are allowing them to remain shut now as a PR move because it’s a worse look if they take them back by force. But make no mistake - that’s what will happen in the long run.

The thing that is really going to hurt Reddit in the long run is that all of the Reddit links on Google are “breaking” - if someone searches something and a Reddit post comes up as a result, there is about a 7/10 chance that the sub is private and the post isn’t visible. This will hurt Reddit badly in the long run because Google will remove these results if they stay that way for, say 2 - 3 weeks. Then Reddit loses the ad revenue and new user capture they were getting from organic Google traffic. They can’t simply get that back by reopening the subs, either - once those pages are downranked on Google, it will be difficult for them to rebuild the traction to get a high listing. Some have been there for 10+ years.