SDF Chatter

Reddit is requiring manual admin approval to make /r’s private, eliminating the main mechanism for the last sitewide protest agains changes to the API.

It's not like they couldn't put a stop to blackouts before, as seen with the third-party app fiasco, but Reddit has now made that tactic entirely impossible. Mods will now need to get permission from Reddit admins before they can make a sub private. Makes me wonder if they're about to do something controversial again soon.

It’s going to be a lot harder to pull off massive protests.

I quit as the top mod of /r/StarTrek in 2021 in protest against Reddit's platforming of vaccine disinformation subreddits. Then in 2023 during the API protest, myself and several of the remaining mods (including mods from /r/Risa and /r/DaystromInstitute) started StarTrek.website.

The consensus I've seen on Lemmy has been largely "we don't need to spread the word about our open platforms because Reddit will do something stupid again and there will be another protest and Lemmy will be promoted there". So I hope we can take this as a lesson that we can't rely on platforms being shitty in order to switch society over to open standards. We need to do our best to make Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed good as well as known.