I went searching for something today and instinctually clicked on a reddit link. Fortunately the sub was dark for the protest anyway, but it’s crazy how ingrained in me it is to go to reddit for everything.
Unfortunately now we’re going to have to get used to clicking on those clickbait tech articles like “TOP 10 FACEBOOK ALTERNATIVES 2023” to find information, and weed out the crappy blogs.
Quitting Reddit’s hard, but it’s heartening to see just how many people are posting from different instances here! I’ve got to admit, even after Mastadons limited success, before today I never seriously thought that federated social media would actually ever work. It just seemed to complicated for average person to grok.
Here we all are though! Decentralizing the decision making for who gets to post and host, what gets seen and what doesn’t, seems to be worth fighting for. For enough of us at least to make this corner of the internet interesting for a while.
I’ve got a question though, are there any non technical people here? If you are interested in technology do you know non technical people who are participating in the black out?
I think a Reddit type platform lends itself better to federation than something like Twitter. Reddit is already split up into sub communities so it’s easier to digest vs. Mastadon/Twitter meant to be one big conversation.
Your question about non-technical savoy folks being on here is valid and there’s probably not many. But Reddit also started out like that and it took many years before it became mainstream. Federated serves are a new thing, even for the technological literate, so I suspect it will take a while to permeate into casual internet users but it will happen in the future.
Yeah I can see a path for this ramping up slowly, especially given the horrible mismanagement of places like Reddit. Even if they weather the storm of the blackout, given the official app, it seems like they’re just chasing the same infinite dumb stream of memes design that places like Facebook and Tiktok have already embraced. Probably because that’s where the money is? I don’t know.
The more niche communities are always what made me hang out at Reddit though! I’d bet they continue to alienate and marginalize them enough that more people continually jump ship over the next couple of years. I do hope Beehaw and other spaces like it succeed in becoming a non-profit and truly community driven, and the web decentralizes itself again.
How do you see that?
Oh, yeah definitely. I’m still struggling to wrap my head around the most basic things. Like, initially I created multiple accounts until I realized I could actually just search for stuff in other instances.
On the website if the username looks like user@instance.com, then it is a user from another instance.
it just works! I don’t know what happens with this reply because I guess beehaw.org is offline right now, but I figure you’ll eventually see it? That this is possible with an organic collection of instances is pretty damn cool, and I hope it keeps on working as more people pile on
I’ll say that sometimes, I click the “Reply” button after writing my reply and it just sits there, seemingly loading forever. Generally has been doing that when a thread was on beehaw.org or lemmy.ml
so the communities that run on a specific instance are dead in the water if that instance is frozen? I thought that maybe the other instances might continue exchanging posts regardless of whether the original instance is currently online
Honestly, I’m not sure. I would hope it could continue with other non-frozen Instances. But in my very limited experience so far, I’ve seen it do that (click Reply, and turn into a spinning circle) a few times. Just never finishes.
Then again, I see this thread is on Beehaw and I’m commenting to it. So I have no idea. I do see my Subscribe is still pending though
responding from beehaw: Yep, we can see you!