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The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. The article describes it as "the official end of the battle," which seems an overstatement to me, but it's the certainly the end of the initial phase.

Did Reddit win? Time will tell!

[-] jdp23@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

Two reasons the ongoing Reddit protests are important:

  1. the protests keep the pressure on reddit and can lead to ongoing news coverage (which also keeps the pressure on reddit) . Otherwise, reddit will be able to spin the narrative "see? we told you it would just blow over and it did"

  2. kbin, Lemmy, and other alternatives aren't yet at the point where they're ready for millions of redditors. For example, the modCoord post makes the important point that a lot of reddit's moderation functionality isn't accessible ... but almost none of this functionality even exists yet on kbin and Lemmy. So most people aren't going to leave yet.

Don't get me wrong, leaving now is also a good option if you can find what you want elsewhere! But not everybody's there yet.

#reddit #kbin #lemmy

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I had shared an earlier version of this last week, and a draft of the updates a few days ago. Thanks to everybody for the feedback!

Here's the key points:

  1. Don't tell people "it's easy"
  2. Improve the "getting-started experience"
  3. Keep scalability and sustainability in mind
  4. Prioritize accessibility
  5. Get ready for trolls, hate speech, harassment, spam, porn, and disinformation
  6. Invest in moderation tools
  7. Experiment to find what approaches are a good fit for the current state of the software
  8. Values matter
  • This is a great opportunity – and it won't be the last great opportunity
[-] jdp23@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

Agreed, great idea. Maybe a code bounty for this?

Ernest says he's definitely interested in accessbility -- he replied when I originally posted "Don't tell people "it's easy", and six more things Kbin, Lemmy, and the fediverse can learn from Mastodon", which has a section on accessibility. But there are a heck of a lot of other priorities so boosting this would be very helpful.

Here's a post from @weirdwriter noting that kbin's fairly good for accessibility. but I know there are some problems -- here's a bug I filed last week.

[-] jdp23@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Thank you very much, I didn't know about that and will add it!

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Draft! Work in Progress! Feedback welcome!

Tens of thousands of people have signed up for KBin and Lemmy accounts since I first published “Don’t tell people “it’s easy”,” hundreds of new instances have been created, and “the threadiverse” is suddenly a hot topic of conversation… Of course, it hasn’t all gone smoothly, but the opportunity isn’t going away.

[-] jdp23@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago
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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by jdp23@kbin.social to c/kbinMeta@kbin.social

Beehaw's moderators have a good post listing the tooling needs -- all of which make a lot of sense to me. Definitely worth looking at these for kbin as well!

[-] jdp23@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

To the contrary: defederation from instances in situations like this is very much in the spirit of the the fediverse. Not attaching NSFW tags to NSFW content is a major moderation fail by lemmynsfw, and restricting content from badly-moderated instances until they get things cleaned up is something that frequently happens.

[-] jdp23@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago

Several people here are saying that the bulk of it is coming from lemmynsfw. If so then it may well be best to defederate in the short term to buy time for a better solution (like marking everything from there NSFW automatically, either by a lemmy enhancement on their end or a kbin enhancement here)

83

“The blackouts are not representative of the greater Reddit community.” Or so he says. Also:

Q: So you’re saying that Apollo, RIF, Sync, they don’t add value to Reddit?

A: Not as much as they take. No way.

[-] jdp23@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago

Mastodon is more Twitter-like; Lemmy is Reddit-like; KBin has elements of both (Magazines and Threads being more Reddit-like, Microblog view being vaguely like Twitter). Mastodon has had a couple of big influxes of people considering leaving Twitter, similar to how Kbin and Lemmy are getting a lot of interest considering leaving Reddit.

What's intriguing is that because they all use the same protocol (ActivityPub), people on Kbin can vote and comment on Lemmy posts, and Mastodon users can comment on Kbin or Lemmy posts. This is called federation, and software that uses ActivityPub is considered part of the "fediverse". There are also dozens of other fediverse software platforms -- Pixelfed is Instagram-like, Bookwyrm is goodreads-like, micro.blog and WriteFreely and others are blogs, etc etc. -- that can all all interact, at least somewhat. Of course the reality's more confusing, sometimes you can't interact between different sites or software, and sometimes interactions are limited (for example you can't vote on Kbin or Lemmy threads from Mastodon).

Here's a post I made a few days ago from a Mastodon account that's also visible in the Lemmy fediverse community, because I tagged the community. It didn't go to Kbin (even though I tagged a Magazine) because federation wasn't working at the time; and some of the replies in on Mastodon went to Lemmy as well, others didn't, who knows why. Oh well. Still, it's amazing when it works!

[-] jdp23@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

Yeah really. But, I'm sure he's surrounded by people -- investors, other CEOs who love the precedent of exploiting their volunteers, probably most if not all Reddit high-level staff -- encouraging him and telling him it's going well. Back in the 1990s Microsoft was known as being in a reality distortion field and I've seen similar things happen at other companies as well.

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The fediverse has always grown in waves and we're at the start of one. It's worth looking at what tactics worked well in the past, to use them again or adapt them and build on them. It's also valuable to look at what went wrong or didn't work out as well in the past, to see if there are ways to do better.

Here's the current table of contents:

  • I'm flashing!!!!!
  • But first, some background
  1. Don't tell people "it's easy"
  2. Improve the "getting-started experience"
  3. Keep scalability and sustainability in mind
  4. Prioritize accessibility
  5. Get ready for trolls, hate speech, harassment, spam, porn, and disinformation
  6. Invest in moderation tools
  7. Values matter
  • This is a great opportunity – and it won't be the last great opportunity

https://privacy.thenexus.today/kbin-lemmy-fediverse-learnings-from-mastodon/

[-] jdp23@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

thanks for forwarding!

[-] jdp23@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

Agreed all around ... although I'd add that the probability that a critical mass of users will leave is quite low in the short term.

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jdp23

joined 1 year ago