People are mourning the loss of a platform. I think it's okay that a majority of Reddit alternatives are talking about its death (at least for them).

I still use Reddit but have been exploring alternatives.

I think the real issue is that the protest coordinators were not able to succinctly explain why they had to protest to begin with. Charging third party app developers for API access is an esoteric topic. Most people don't even know what an API is. Most people don't use third party apps. Most people also don't care.

On many subreddits that have polls, it seems like a majority favor keeping their subs open. It seems like the userbase is generally ambivalent or even hostile towards the protest at large.

Agree. I don't plan to leave Reddit but it's good to look at the alternatives that are available out there.

An indefinite shutdown would not work - the moderators of the subs who perform them will be kicked out and be replaced by people who want to keep the subs in operation. Plus, it's a disservice to people who do use Reddit as a resource for work or otherwise. I think a 48 hour protest is reasonable, but beyond that, there's not a whole lot you can do.

Yeah I imagine as Lemmy scales you are going to see moderation issues. But that's message board culture in general.

Well on the Lemmy subreddit, some people are already complaining about moderation issues here, and how you can't block federated servers you don't want to see individually - that is up to the federated server itself. Honestly, while Lemmy seems cool, I can see issues arising as it scales, especially with regards to moderation.

Beehaw seems to be fine, but some users have explained that they take issue with Lemmy.ml's moderation - chiefly from the main developer who created this platform to begin with. And that's troubling too. For example, on Lemmy.ml, any talk about Russia or China (or anything similar) is banned. You can't safely talk about the war in Ukraine here without getting banned from the main federated server.

I mean upvotes are related to how old a post is.

Anyways I don't expect places like Lemmy to fix the ills of social media - eventually running something like this will cost their owners too much money and something will have to give. Also moderation has always been an issue, even with the message boards of old.

I'm very impressed with the federation here. Kept thinking each instance was on its own but you can post across different instances. Kind of neat.

The issue is that a lot of them died when Reddit became mainstream. Go back to some of the ones still standing - the activity isn't what it used to be. You see a post every few days on some of them. Why would I post on such sites if no one is going to reply? Might as well post on Reddit lol, where I will get a response within an hour at least.

Yeah exactly. I think what we need is decentralization and a move back to smaller hobbyist message boards - the costs of running such communities is more sustainable for individual owners and they are not so big that their owners would look to sell them out.

Hello. While what Reddit is doing isn't great, it's the reality of running a site that's now owned by venture capital to make some kind of economic return for its owners. Running a site like that isn't free, and advertising dollars alone are probably not enough to generate the sort of return that its owners are looking for (or even pay for the its costs).

The core issue is twofold: Big Tech has devalued online services to the point where users are inured to not paying for them, and because of this inurement, most users are unwilling to pay for most online services if they don't seem to be offering a value add. Gaming services like Steam have managed to get their users to pay but that's because they are offering a service that's generally superior to piracy, such as immediate downloads, achievements, and other online services. But no one is ever going to pay to use a message board, and I doubt gimmicks like Reddit Gold bring in much money.

Perhaps the future is found in the past - people migrating back to self-hosted message boards - there used to be thousands of these back in the 1990s and 2000s. Some of them were run as small businesses, others were run as hobbyist projects by their owners. But I doubt there's going to be a mass exodus, and unfortunately, centralization has increasingly become the norm for the Internet.