Turns out, pretending the entire Internet is equal to 5 apps from mega corps (largely fueled by pretend money) wasn’t the best long term play.
Who would have thought?This has become the prevailing opinion for most of the tech-savvy folks that I know, but it’s gaining traction with a wider audience.
Having steeped in corpo-climate for two decades, it’s naïve to say that the C-Suite has ever maintained a realistic perspective on the business that they run; but it is baffling to me that corporations like Reddit have completely lost sight of their actual product - a clearinghouse of perpetually donated content - and seem to believe that their platform cannot be easily duplicated, or made obsolete nearly overnight.
It’s exciting to be an insider as new paradigms like the fediverse become more widely known. If the last week is any indicator, there is a non-zero chance that ultra-capitalist hubris will be punished.
The fact of the matter is that I don’t care if something is a monopoly as long as it’s a monopoly for it’s quality. Reddit used to be that, a hub for damn near all of my interests, and I used Boost to make the experience great.
But reddit is getting worse with this change, so I’m here now.
I don’t care if something is a monopoly as long as it’s a monopoly for it’s quality.
But the problem with social media is that monopolies in this area aren’t about quality, they are about user base size. Which makes them impossible to dethrone once they hit critical mass. Reddit and other social media sites have a massive amount of content with people willing to figure out a way to sift through the garbage.
It will be interesting to see how bad things get once reddit moderators can no longer use bots and other tools in order to help them sift through content due to the API changes.
Yeah. There’s nothing inherently wrong with monopolies. The problem with them is just the behaviour that they tend to slip into, the squeezing of their customers for maximum revenue while not bothering to invest any of it in improving their services. There are some “natural” monopolies that manage to do okay, though usually as a result of government regulation.
Some monopolies are so solidly “okay” that we don’t even notice that they’re monopolies. The Internet, for example. What alternatives to it exist? None, really. But since it’s a decentralized protocol rather than some sort of Internet Incorporated with shareholders and quarterly profits to maximize and whatnot it’s managed to stay good and the fact that it’s a monopoly is actually beneficial in many ways.
As for monopolies… they are inherently bad because of the lack of motivation to innovate, or improve. You have no other option, and no ability to create one.
I don’t want to stray too far from the topic, but I feel like I need to address the mention of the internet as a monopoly.
If you’re talking about TCP/IP, it’s just a protocol that the most widely used - but others exist, and outperform it in their niches.
The internet is a collection of technologies that are owned and operated by thousands of companies. All have competition in their arenas.
ISPs have constructed local fiefdoms - but there are nearly always multiple services that one can use. Backbone companies own the major routes, but you can almost always go around one if it misbehaves. Myriad email providers, websites, etc exist to offer choices, as well.
Categorically, the internet can not be or become a monopoly. It’s core purpose is to provide as many avenues as possible to connect machines to AVOID monopolization.
Interestingly, the downfall of Communism was precisely that political communism forms a government-managed monopoly, exhibiting exactly the characteristics you outline. People who rail against communism are really railing against monopoly and the stagnancy and corruption it creates. And yet somehow some of these people are all-in on libertarianism.
Succinctly stated. I wish authoritarian left types would understand this.
seem to believe that their platform cannot be easily duplicated, or made obsolete nearly overnight.
As much as it pains me to say it, I think they are right. The value in social media is in the size of their user base and I don’t see a mass migration to another platform really happening unless reddit itself went completely offline for several weeks. People do not like change and Reddit will continue to be just “good enough” despite the API changes. If anything their decline will be extremely gradual since moderators will have lost most of their third party moderation tools. And niche communities can probably keep ticking along without them for the most part.
I don’t mind if most of reddit users stay there, we just need to attract the valuable ones. Back on reddit I wouldn’t have welcomed the entirety of Twitter for example, too many bad contributors.
Contributors also want their content to be seen and communities with 500 subscribers aren’t all that attractive. So I don’t expect anyone to abandon the mainstream options. The most we can hope for (and all I’m really asking for) is cross-site posting and participation.
Go ahead and visit Reddit, just be sure to post/comment on on the fediverse as well.
eh, depends. I can see myself contributing to a smaller audience of people I care for rather than a bigger one of people I don’t.
Previous sites died because there was a continual stream of new VC funded initiatives still in the ‘seduce new users’ phase of low-zero monetization for people to jump to. That tap of new, user-friendly sites has been shut off by the recent interest rate hikes curtailing VC funding.
Worried we’ll eventually settle into semi-collusive model we see Cell Carriers and ISPs have. If all 5 major social media sites stay in lock step of monetization, who are you going to go to? And without VC money, what new site will be able to truly scale?
What I really don’t understand is, how all these C suites are apparently a) completely unaware of theor cost structure and b) never seem to understand what they’re actually selling.
Reddit is nothing special, do you really need a bunch of Valley bros earning 200k or more?
Do you really need all those stupid extras like NFTs? Reddit launched their NFTs way too late, when even the pretty big idiots started to doubt the concept.
The older I get, the less I understand the whole world of business administration. Nothing makes sense, it feels like 90% of the CEO are working really hard to ram their companies hard enough into the ground to hit magma.
Because those C suites do it for their salary, not for the greater good or the good of their investors.
Whether their hubris is punished or not is of no consequence to me. In some ways the ultimate karma is waking up every day to find out we are ourselves. I’m more concerned with building cool stuff for us to use than with anyone getting what I think is their comeuppance.
nobody thought. that’s a big part of the problem-- late-stage capitalism doesn’t plan beyond this quarter’s profit statement.
The pricing Reddit is charging is obscene and would mean that Apollo would be forced to pay $20 million per year to keep the app running. Other popular third-party apps would have to pay similarly outrageous costs. It’s clearly a blatant attempt to run them off Reddit so the site can force users to use its first-party app instead.
It’s nice to see an article which finally states the obvious truth–that Reddit wants the third party apps to die so they can have a captive audience to advertise to.
It’s not just that. If I’m accessing all of my reddit content through the app developers api pull requests they can’t track what I’m doing except for when I comment/post/vote. They can’t tell how long I spend on the site, where I’m scrolling, what I’m looking at, nothing. All of those API pulls are through the developers account, not mine.
So not only am I not looking at their ads, I’m also not giving them any information on what I’m doing at all, so they can’t really give that information to their advertising partners.
Then of course they don’t have the ability to send me random alerts on my phone to pull me back into their app.
I’m so tired of big tech taking social platforms and trying to make it increasingly profitable every year. It’s just ridiculous.
Remember when social media was created as a concept to talk to other people easily? I’m so thankful for Lemmy and Mastodon and hope to see more decentralized social media networks appear in the future where corporate greed does not impact the direction
It would help alot If telecom/internet infrastructure was treated like our other infrastructure. Not to mention the literal billions of dollars in fraud that companies like Verizon and Comcast get away with. I still get mad when I think about how they were given massive sums of money to expand fiber optic infrastructure and gave themselves bonuses instead.
The original infrastructure in North America was the railway. I’m really thankful that the Internet didn’t develop the same way the railway did, with lots of suffering and exploitation and a few people getting really rich.
The playbook used by the Comcasts and Verizons isn’t new; it goes right back to the Phoenicians, and probably even earlier.
It’s what all public companies do. Once your company is public, it is somewhat your duty to raise profits every year forever and ever to make your investors money and to attract investors. It sucks, but that’s how the market works.
Profit isn’t bad, but making money whilst destroying your customers trust, and disrespecting your customers, and getting away with it, is all too common.
Make money, AND be excellent.
That was back in the day when the devs were paid by investor money, and the money the investors invested was someone elses money so they didn’t care. Those days are over.
It’s what all public companies do. Once your company is public, it is somewhat your duty to raise profits every year forever and ever to make your investors money and to attract investors. It sucks, but that’s how the market works.
A big part of the issue is that there is a general assumption that the execs are making the companies MORE profitable, as opposed to the reality that they are trying to make them profitable at all.
Enshitification happens because things start awesome and free to attract users. Once there is enough base they start to change things such that they can eventually make money.
The only way to about this is to self fund and stop assuming Web apps are free.
It’s not like C-level folks aren’t cashing in well before their companies are profitable. They put on executive clothes and live executive lifestyles, either because it’s what they want or because it’s part of the theatre put on for investors.
I feel confident in the assumption that most users wouldn’t begrudge a company a modest profit off of the content they produce uncompensated on their sites. But it’s an unwritten social contract, and therefore ripe for abuse.
Some of it is born of users not realizing the value of what they give to the corporations— their data for mining, their engagement for attracting and maintaining even more users to the site. Some of it is born of the explicit contracts being written solely by one side(the execs).
Completely agree on all points. The idea of “modest” is not something that VC wants so unless you are grass roots there is no way it will fly
The only way to about this is to self fund and stop assuming Web apps are free.
It’s possible to make web apps that are close to free, but that isn’t how developers work these days. Everybody has to use JavaScript, Kubernetes, Docker, and a 500-person developer/infrastructure team. When in reality, 99.999% of websites could be made without JavaScript, hosted on a single VPS with SQLite.
A couple of my side projects run on 1GB VPS that cost $10/month, and they would easily run on a 512MB VPS if those were still offered.
Yeah I’m hosting a video streaming service, a Discord clone, a CMS, git web, and my blog on a $120 ThinkCentre (4 cores, 8GB RAM, 1TB SAMSUNG SSD) in my home, and it works wonderfully. Basically no upkeep costs, the extra electricity used is not even noticeable.
Everybody has to use JavaScript, Kubernetes, Docker, and a 500-person developer/infrastructure team. When in reality, 99.999% of websites could be made without JavaScript, hosted on a single VPS with SQLite.
There are legit reasons to use k8s and docker even on a small project. It ensures that your dependencies are isolated from those of the host OS. Gone are the days where you have to worry about multiple different services clashing because they all want to use the same ports, directories etc by default or different versions of the same service.
I’m also done being called at 2AM in the morning because the security team decided to automatically update all servers and forgot we were on the exemption list. Now our install is broken and nobody remembers what the original configuration was. So we spend 8 hours in a “war room” trying to unscramble our eggs.
Docker makes everything infinitely more stable and it’s not that big of a deal to get running. It’s better than the old days of controlled chaos.
None of those things require Docker or Kubernetes… You can use containers + cgroups without adding complexity on top.
I don’t necessarily disagree. There are many ways to achieve the same or similar results. But docker seems to have become the popular option to the point where services are offering docker configurations out of the box. Meaning I have a standard, officially sanctioned way of doing what you described. Someone has already figured out how to properly containerize what to me is only a dependency and I can focus my efforts elsewhere. The option to get my hands dirty is still available, but it becomes a choice.
Yup, you can definitely take shortcuts that make development easier at the cost of maintenance being harder and more expensive. That’s exactly the problem I was describing.
I am thinking about hosting a single user instance in which I could have communities on a Raspberry Pi 4. Do you think it is doable? Asking because if not I’ll just get a VPS.
Yes, but you will need to put the database and static file storage on a USB or network storage device as opposed to the SD card. The networking is going to be the hard part.
I replaced the SD card with a 2TB SSD connected via USB, so that should probably work then. The networking will indeed be confusing. I am already using the Pi to run a Nextcloud server, Jellyfin server, and a few other smaller applications. I imagine it is possible to also have a reverse proxy on the same machine? Also the join-lemmy site and install docs keep giving me a 502 bad gateway so something in production must be wrong right now, I guess I’ll have to wait until tomorrow.
Yeah, if you already have the routing and such set up for nextcloud/etc then it should be simple to add another reverse proxy to lemmy.
Re: the site being down, you can find the Markdown documentation here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/blob/4249465e9960cad97245aa03b3ad4c758ff945c7/src/en/administration/administration.md
This is what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification”, and it’s part of the reason I’m on Mastodon and Lemmy now.
It makes me so happy to see Doctorow’s smart work referenced around here.
I’m glad these corporations are finally starting to reveal their corporate interests. Hopefully more people will wake up and jump ship.
deleted by creator
The pricing Reddit is charging is obscene and would mean that Apollo would be forced to pay $20 million per year to keep the app running. Other popular third-party apps would have to pay similarly outrageous costs. It’s clearly a blatant attempt to run them off Reddit so the site can force users to use its first-party app instead.
I wish all articles covering the debacle but it at clearly as this.
They have something else in common: Bots.
And then there’s one more thing in common: they get paid for bot activity just the same as organic activity so they’re incentivized to under-report the problem.
Before the IPO happens, they have to rid themselves of third-party clients so that the app store numbers can’t be extrapolated to verify site-wide user activity.
they have to rid themselves of third-party clients so that the app store numbers can’t be extrapolated to verify site-wide user activity.
I must be having a pre-morning-coffee dumb, but how would this extrapolation realistically work, in your opinion? Those install numbers aren’t exactly… exact, from what I understand.
Discord is a tough one, since those communities aren’t open to search indexer and archiver crawls, losing that would extinguish a lot more of our collective knowledge.
Hopefully dedicated server teams branch to matrix or another more open platform.
deleted by creator
Yeah, that is exactly the problem. When communities move to Discord, discussion between highly-involved individuals on a subject moves to a completely private place and can be purged at a moment’s notice.
I’ve used it mostly to chat between friend groups so that makes sense to me, but I don’t like having to join Discord communities because of this as well.
deleted by creator
The amount of Discord communities that are really just a mishmash of stickies and google docs is absurd.
Yeah. Discord ist just slack with somewhat better UX and more tracking. But chat history is among the worst ways to access past knowledge. It’s just so lost.
People rarely think about that…
For sharing memes, this is fine. But for many other things, this isn’t.
IMO little of value would be lost with Discord. It’s mainly used like a live chat support, rather than a wiki. The actual source of knowledge is usually elsewhere.
The actual source of knowledge is usually elsewhere.
At least I certainly hope it would be.
Many communities have closed down their forums and moved over to Discord. Some information is really hard to find on Discord. I find it quite sad.
Plus discord’s forum piece is straight up garbage. Moving your entire platform to discord is as crazy as doing it to reddit honestly.
Many communities and projects have replaced their wiki’s with Discord and this model is being adopted by more and more communities.
Gone are wiki articles, which are replaced by live chat with a terrible search functionality and interface.
Discord is like the worst source for knowledge anyones has ever used as such.
I regularly find myself searching for stuff where there is only a small community and when they use discord and you want to look something up, you can straight up look into the sourcecode because it helps just as much. It is really devastating to be in this situation and I would really like for people to just get rid of discord and use a real wiki or forum for this kind of stuff.
I agree. Discord is a bad replacement and frustrating as hell to use. They’re trying to get people to use the new Discord forum feature which is a little better visually but it doesn’t solve the other issues you raise.
lol dude this is flat out wrong. Being able to ask active communitites things is useful to a lot of people. Have you ever even heard of IRC???
What do you think happened before google had everything indexed?
It’s useful to chat it out with people sometimes especially when you are all collectively centered around a single topic.
I’ve learned mass amounts of things through IRC and often times they don’t just give you the answer they give you clues to help you figure it out.
Discord will be similar for many people. It’s not necessary to archive every last bit of information. It’s OK to talk to real people who enjoy talking about said topic and letting them guide you real time.
Oh yeah, it’s always cool to ask randos if a mod also runs on Linux only to be told by 3 people that they don’t know and then to have someone change the topic.
Wouldn’t want that in an indexable thread in some forum where you might find it by it’s title and also see answers directly and not wade through 5 weeks of 17 topic only to find out that no one got it to work.
And yes, there was a time before search engines, but you cannot possibly suggest it was better than now. Now we have better tools and should use them.
I’m not saying it’s better my point is there is shit loads of that going on since forever. It’s not hurt anything and some people prefer to chat it out because searching can also get you a load of nonsense. Guarantee you got your answer. It’s mostly super niche communities. If properly run they have searchable forums of a FAQ.
The thing with IRC is that noone ever used it as a reference. It’s the equivalent of a water cooler, no meeting minutes are made and people treat it as such.
Before google there was usenet and mailing lists and their archives and also forums. And web rings. There were index pages (how yahoo made its money) and, *shocker*, web search, in particular altavista. It might not have all been searchable but it was discoverable and you didn’t need an account much less an invitation to read a howto.
And frankly speaknig finding stuff on altavista back then was often easier than now on google, with all that SEO-infested garbage floating about and google ignoring advanced search syntax more often than it respects it.
Lol dude no. There was practically nothing online back then. I was around back then learning linux and programming. IRC was a great place to go otherwise you had to actually read books and RTFM. The wealth of information that we have today wasn’t even close back when alta vista was something you used. I had a job where I specifically had to search things and input data about it and there were like 5 different search engines offering all manner of different results. It was horrible.
IRC had massive amount of people and chatting with them was helpful. Discord offers that. Your beef is just that it’s not searchable and takes way more engagement for you to try and figure it out.
That’s just one place, but it’s very useful for a lot of people. IRC is still around and decent amounts still use it and have all along. Those communities that decide to be discord are probably so freakin niche that even if you just log in day 1 ask your question it probably gets answered in detail in 2 seconds.
For me, the problem is not discords real time chat functionality (e.g. like IRC).It’s that communities are using it as their only source of information and getting rid of wiki pages and support forums.
There are many open source projects and communities whose documentation lives entirely in Discord. This makes finding information much harder as search engines don’t have the information indexed so you resort to asking on chat and hoping someone replies or using Discord’s horrible search functionality (it’s very basic and has a poor UI)
I just cancelled my discord nitro(whatever the previous highest tier annual plans) in May because as a paying subscriber, I still get those intrusive ads that pops above your user corner and won’t go away. You are only given options to “try it” “maybe later” and no “not interested”, also no button to close it.
The ad client probably pay then significant amount of money that it’s worth the risk to piss off paying users.
I sent my support ticket and got lead around the hoops and need to send the request to sort of their internal voting board, which at that point I just gave up and cancel my subscription. If I got spammed more I will probably just go back to web interface and use ublock to start blocking elements. And if I can’t I probably just gonna say bye. (the campaign was over, there are no newer spams, but they lost my annual sub pretty much forever as I don’t think discord is gonna “be better”. )
By ads do you mean those games and shit on the bottom left?
Yep, those. Discord lose my money support pretty much forever.(cause I don’t think they will ever back off since they got big enough user base.)
We need to understand, though, that the Fediverse is going to undergo similar changes and struggles. People aren’t going to want to pay to run servers, forever, and there will be lost servers and ones that suddenly have ads or subscription fees.
Granted, this creates competition and it’ll be better for the end user, but the utopia of Mastodon and KBin is going to be challenged by the crappy, but very real, realities of the world.
I wonder if there is a better way to distribute the upkeep of all the data. Like bittorrent has the swarm and crypto got random people using hardware to prop up the transaction network. Currently these single fediverse instances puts most of the burden on the hoster and becomes a single failure point for that instance.
Yeah that’s my only concern and why I stick with the major instances, for now. I know monetization for the sake of running the services is going to have to come at some point. I’m sure we’ll see a bunch of variations and approaches and I hope people are open to the ideas. I want the fediverse to grow and, for that to happen, we need to make sure it’s sustainable for the people who choose to help prop it up.
Some people just aren’t willing to pay anything unfortunately.
or we can get cooperative model that is already present in a couple mastodon instances.
Well, that would never happen as long as they figure out a appropriate way to make a profit. Mastodon using ‘Crowdfunding’ system to earn money
I think the only difference is that there’s at least a chance to keep interacting with the community from an instance that is not showing ads.
Indeed and there is also competition between instances, instead of being left to the whims of a sole dictator of a centralized service.
I think it is a combination between interest rate hikes from the free money paradigm that propped up startups and the gig economy and the AI hype train driving the capture of public data (think enclosures 3.0) at the expense of strong communities. This somehow reminds me of when post-dot-com bubble companies like google had to become “profitable” so “don’t be evil” went down the drain and they found ways to monetize their users’ data.
“Don’t be evil” was always going to take second place to “make money”. That reality sucks, but it’s inevitable in a corporate oligarchy.
We’re not free from it. If the fediverse took off and ISPs somehow ganged up on the activitypub protocol to force it to make money, some larger instances are going to crack, that’s what I mean.
I don’t understand - why would ISPs gang up on ActivityPub? How would it force larger instances to “crack”?
Are you saying that they would ramp up costs for utilizing the protocol specifically? Wouldn’t that go against Net Neutrality…?
You’re 100% correct.
This phenomenon isn’t new. I used to have a GeoCities account back in the day. Eventually Yahoo! Bought them, and you know what happened with them. Had a Hotmail account too — and you know what happened to that. Had an ICQ and an AIM account too.
The problem now is that these more recent platforms worked to make themselves harder to replace, so when it came time to replace them, there was more resistance.
I still have active Hotmail accounts. It isn’t like they went bad, they just changed over time.
Although email is probably a good example of what will happen even if you introduce a decentralized system. You still have a few main companies that run most email on the internet and their spam policies dictate who gains access to that user base. The free versions are run by ads, but there are paid versions that give more options to those who buy the service.
The problem now is that these more recent platforms worked to make themselves harder to replace, so when it came time to replace them, there was more resistance.
Things have become more centralized and people just want tech to work. So when things like the fediverse need patients while “stuff gets worked out” they are not used to it.
That’s because the main audience of the internet shifted from the tech literate to the tech illiterate, who can’t deal with issues
Yes and technology has gotten a lot better too. The younger generation has had technology that more or less “just works.” They didn’t have to learn how to troubleshoot just to be able to use it as intended like previous generations have had to.
Half the fun is using things for how they weren’t intended.
I was thinking exactly this! At some point a long time ago, all of these centralized platforms were “cool” until “uncool” people started joining and sharing garbage content… now we’re in a bit of a renaissance as these platforms commit social suicide. The more intellectual individuals are both able and willing to jump ship to these “complex platforms”.
Will Grandma or crazy Uncle Bill ever join Mastodon on their own and understand federation? No, probably not. But that guy you went to University with who is now working as a Civil Engineer or Financial Advisor will probably figure it out and migrate when it gets bad enough.
Now I ask, who’s content would you rather see filling your feed? 🤣
I’m wondering if a Co-op model would work for some of these alternatives. Then they would be less reliant on a single owner/developer system, there would be additional support for some of the businessy components, and there would be a built-in groups structure for resolution of issues.
I’ve been watching the formation of a co-op Etsy alternative, and I’m very interested to see how that goes. I think it’s fine to complain about corporatization, but I think it’s also crucial to build and support other models at the same time.
I am not a member of this Artisan’s Coop, but am considering it.
@mem_somerville_kbin @hedge if you haven’t checked out the mastodon side of the fediverse, #socialcoop uses this model and has existed for a couple years.
Super–glad to hear that.
@mem_somerville_kbin @hedge My insurance company, Amica, is a mutual company; I get a suitable rebate every year.
Liberty Mutual is also a mutual company, but I hear they never issue any rebates, that management thinks it is more fun to spend any extra money on themselves.
Cooperates and mutuals are not a magic alternative to rapacious capitalism.
Is the thing in common venture capital? Its venture capital, isn’t it. I knew it.
destroy reddit ASAP. force google to remove its reliance on reddit. It’s time we stopped giving free content to enrich idiots like spez and ohanian. and oh yea and stop Musk as well.
I didn’t know Discord has a weird CEO too?!
Discord will be the next big social media thing, that will crash. Investors invests billion of dollars in Discord and they rejected in 2021 a offer from Microsoft, for 12 billion dollars. Seems like the investors wants more, we will see when they start to monetize the users by themselves, to get the invests back.
