This describes me as well, curious about the fedaverse, but not so much that I’d actually go through the trouble to look into it, especially with the, in retrospect completely inaccurate, comments on reddit dismissing mastadon/lemmy/kbin as “too complicated.” The blackout got me to break my reddit habbit and create a lemmy account. Now I’m trying out Kbin.
What I think is really important is that Kbin/Lemmy are fun and exciting new projects. I didn’t just find a Reddit replacement, I found something new with a vision and that people are invested in and are actively building from the ground up, and I feel a desire to contribute what I can. For the first time in a long time I am excited about new thing on the internet. I didn’t realize how much the corporate consolidation of social media had turned it into a drag. I used to be active on Reddit in various communities, but in the last few years had turned into a lurker, mindlessly scrolling repetitive content to kill time. But being part of the Kbin/Lemmy communities is actually fun. Maybe its just me, but I think that might be a big part of Reddit’s eventual downfall. If Reddit and Kbin/Lemmer were simply equivalents, I could imagine eventually going back to Reddit. But their not, here real people are talking and building communities, on Reddit corporations are trying to make money off bot farmed content and the illusion of open communities. I just can’t imagine myself going back to the latter.
The problem with this theory is that they could have done two tiered pricing. Reddit could have charged TPA developers one price and the LLM trainers a much higher price for API access. In fact, I believe that is exactly what Reddit is doing, they just haven’t been public about what they are trying to charge the LLMs. The Verge asked Spez about whether the LLM folks are biting on this and what that price would be, he just responded that they are “in talks.”
If Reddit didn’t want to kill TPAs, they also could have given them a year or so to figure out their business models, rather than the 30 days they were given. Hell, Reddit could have backed down at any point and extended the time period for implementing charges.
If Spez thinks he’s going to make money off LLMs, I think he’s delusional. The OpenAIs, Googles, and Metas out there have already used the Reddit data to train their models. That ship has sailed. The focus in the LLM world now is making better models, more compact models, refining their answers and making them more accurate, etc. The days of throwing vast amounts of random data at these models is probably over. For GPT 5, OpenAI is probably not looking to spend 50 million on new Reddit comments. Instead they will spend that to hire experts to revise GPT 4s outputs and use that as training data.