From the article:

"Moving to the Fediverse

This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge. A social network built on an open protocol can afford some host-agnosticism, and allow communities to persist even if individual hosts fail or start to abuse their power. Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary, as we saw last fall when Twitter cracked down on discussions of its Fediverse-alternative, Mastodon."

  • sdrawk@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    How and why did Reddit think copying Twitter’s API pricing mistake was a good idea? And why charge Apollo $20 million?!

    Like that’s just a cricket bat to the face.

    • ampcold@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I think it is more like the protoweb. How this works is more similar to BBSes, Usenet, IRC networks and the like from 30 years ago. Truly distributed networks with no central controlling mechanism and the systems communicate by simply agreeing on the technical protocol. That was what the internet was designed for i the first place. The last couple of decades where everything has been centralized to a few big megacorps is an abomination.

      • mobyduck648@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Since the fediverse unlike the rest of the web consists mostly of people hostile to aggressive monetisation there’s a built-in limit to how ‘capitalist’ (in the popular sense rather than the technical sense) an instance can be in terms of funding it. Instances will be forced to find alternative ways to pay the bills to the traditional ‘our users are the commodity we sell’ approach of the corporate social media platforms if they want to stick around for the long run which will be a fantastic thing for the web I think.

    • Stoneykins@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I’ve been thinking we call it web4.0 to mess with the cryptobros. Idk if it is an accurate name, but I bet they would hate it.

  • crank@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    This is the best most comprehensive article written on this subject. And there is a link to every other article. As usual EFF does their homework and applies their judgement to describe perfectly:

    The heart of this fight is for what Reddit’s CEO calls their “valuable corpus of data,” i.e. the user-made content on the company’s servers, and for who gets live off this digital commons. While Reddit provides essential infrastructural support, these community developers and moderators make the site worth visiting, and any worthwhile content is the fruit of their volunteer labor. It’s this labor and worker solidarity which gives users unique leverage over the platform, in contrast to past backlash to other platforms.

    • ropean@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I’ll soon need to back on some of my optional subscriptions, but the yearly donation to EFF is staying for sure

      • 667@fedia.io
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        1 year ago

        This seriously blows my mind. You’re commenting from Mastodon on a Beehaw thread which I’m reading and replying via Fedia.io. All this interconnection is amazing; it truly embodies the concept of an internet.

        We should remind people that we have zero qualms about email which is essentially a federated service. You can be on Gmail, Yahoo, or Bing and trust that your message will be delivered to where you point it.

        The only difference being that email is pointed to a particular user on a given instance, and here messages are pointed to magazines/communities.

        • WhiteOakBayou@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          On mastodon search for the account @news@beehaw.org it will be this lemmy sub but in mastodon. Commenting on posts in mastodon will also comment on the lemmy thread.

    • doctortofu@reddthat.com
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      1 year ago

      Unbridled capitalism is destroying the internet everything it touches.

      When the ONLY motive for doing (or not doing) something is profit, things go to sit sooner or later. The example I often use is that we actually have enough food in the planet to feed everyone. We just throw a large portion of it away or destroy it, because in so many cases food is not made/grown to feed people, but to generate profits… Sad reality of late stage capitalism.

      • deo@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Agreed. A lot of it is due to misplaced or misrepresented priorities. If you don’t account for human and environmental impacts in the proverbial “bottom line”, you’re gonna have a bad time. If we implemented metrics for sustainability and societal improvement as part of the “worth” or “profits” of a company, the world and our future in it may be a little less bleak of a place. Instead, the current system places waaay too much emphasis on short-term goals that are frankly not in line with what I would consider “productivity”.

    • motorwerks@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Just the Internet, huh? I think it’s ruining a few things. Especially when it’s coupled w/ the forever growth mentality.

  • Cyder@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    Sadly, Reddit has likely won the short-term battle. But hopefully, this Blackout raises awareness of the need for alternatives. Whether it be Lemmy/Kbin, some up-and-coming site like Squabbles or Tildes, or something not yet created, the seeds of migration off Reddit have been planted. If Reddit has such apathy for its communities pre-IPO, just imagine how bad it will be post-IPO when they are dealing with Wallstreet directly.

    • girthero@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Yeah a lot of naysayers had me convinced a short protest would do nothing, but you’re right… This is about awareness. I’ve noticed particularly in the last year a downgrade in quality content on reddit and im sure others are noticing. Lemmy might not be ready yet, but it can be with some building inertia and useability improvements.

      • Dan_Rachevaski@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        If they think people will left reddit in droves and reddit will shutdown during the blackout, yeah they are wrong. The blackout is about awareness, and during this short 48 hours, we already discovered swathes upon swathes of reddit alternatives, some are bigger than other, some are livelier than other, all within their communities yet federating each other, far from whateverthefuck spez is doing. And for that, the blackout is successful.

        Lemmy or Kbin might be small, but hey, at least we can quite certain that we are human contributors, not bots.

        • Vex_Detrause@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Just to be the devil’s advocate here. What if Reddit joined the fediverse, what’s stopping them from opening their doors to the increasing fediverse users and use their ads-machine on fediverse?

          • Makiterr@iusearchlinux.fyi
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            1 year ago

            use their ads-machine on fediverse

            How would that part work?

            Also, if they did join the fediverse, that would significantly reduce user lock-in to their site - which is why they won’t.

  • Pete Hahnloser@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    This, I did not know:

    Details about Reddit’s API-specific costs were not shared, but it is worth noting that an API request is commonly no more burdensome to a server than an HTML request, i.e. visiting or scraping a web page. Having an API just makes it easier for developers to maintain their automated requests.

    • mizmoose@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, there’s nothing special about an API. It’s just a shortcut for the app to use to get specific info from the server.

      • sydneybrokeit@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Even worse, their official app uses the same API – and, by estimates, the Reddit app uses more calls than Apollo does.

        They wanted more per user than they will ever make. A multiple of that, in fact.

        • mizmoose@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Yep. This is Huffman having a tantrum because he found out someone is making enough money to live on with their coding, and his company isn’t getting a slice.

          RES is used by some significant percentage of Redditors and they take donations to fund their work. I’m willing to bet they’re next on the chopping block of his tantrum.