Now that Pawb.Social has forked Lemmy, I thought it would be appropriate to go ahead and compile a list of changes or additions that have been suggested, or that have been spotted by others or myself. This is hardly a comprehensive list, and down below will be two comments by me, one for changes to back-end changes or additions and one for the front-end suggestions as well.

A quick note before I start

One important thing I do want to stress is that any changes or additions made should not render our fork incompatible with other Lemmy instances, the apps that allows for easy usage of Lemmy (Jerboa, Thunder, etc), nor cause issues for interacting with, or interactions from, the rest of the Fediverse. To take a quote from Linux Kernel development: Don't Break Userspace!

Now, let me specify for any who aren't in the know about the differences between back-end and -front-end are:

• Front-end: focuses on the user interface, designing the visual elements, and ultimately the UI elements that a user will interact with on the web page.

• Back-end: deals with the server-side functionality, handling data processing, storage, and communication with databases and external systems (The rest of the Fediverse) using server-side programming languages and frameworks. For Lemmy, this is done with the Rust language.

Now, with that summary done, here is a (still WiP) list of changes:

Back-end

• Addition: Individual community blocking (as opposed to the current instance and user-only blocking).
• Addition: Ability to follow entire instance (or at least follow all communities on an instance).
• Addition: Allow for individuals to block instances and communities, instead of requiring instance-wide action to block them.
• Addition: Give instance admins better moderation tools (hashed IP address, etc. Needs to be GDPR compliant)
• Change: Better support for automatically linking other communities (and instances) back to your primary instance for easier following and interaction.
• Change: Better cross-compatibility between Lemmy and the Mastodon/Pleroma side of the Fediverse.
• Change: Better cross-compatibility with KBin.
• More to come

Back-end & Front-end

(For things that will require changes on both ends to function properly)

• Addition: Post flaring - To allow for better post management, sorting, viewing, and moderation.
• Addition: Ability to sort communities into groups (similar to multireddit).
• Addition: 2FA during login/sensitive actions like password changes.
• Addition: Mark servers and people as “friends” so they display a marker by their name elsewhere.
• Addition: Better nsfw post handling, more specific viewing settings, etc.
• Addition: Adding notes to users (for moderation purposes)

Front-end

• Addition: Add more themes/theming support to the UI.
• Addition: Add better support for widescreen displays.
• Addition: Ability to pick a default sorting method (perhaps per community).
• Change: Refresh and organize some of the UI elements for Lemmy (somethings are just a bit outdated looking...).
• Change: Alter donation button at the top to point to the donation portal for the/an instance (this should be the default tbh, the prominent button shouldn't direct to the Lemmy devs to begin with...)
• Change: Move all information about Lemmy and the Lemmy devs to one, out of the way location, potentially as a citation in the footer.
• Change: Add link pointing to the GitHub fork for Pawb.Social
• More to come.

Please see below for the two threads to add your own thoughts or comments on things you want added, changed, or even removed. All comments and thoughts are welcomed!> ability to sort communities into groups (similar to multireddit).

If this is true, then some things start to make a lot of sense. By making the user calls so incredibly expensive for the API, Reddit makes it so it would be come prohibitively expensive for basically anyone else to be able to access. Google could likely still afford it (but they would certainly pay a lot to do so), but an upstart that would be more likely to wreck OpenAI, like MidJourney did with DALL-E, becomes far less likely to be able to afford the cost.

It basically gives OpenAI padding between itself and upstart competitors where it matters most, training data. Further still, these changes might also explain some of the changes to the API, like the blocking of NSFW material. Doing that makes it easier for OpenAI to train on it, without needing to worry as much about filtering. It also explains the urgency of it too, as OpenAI is desperately seeking to keep upstarts, especially open-source ones, from being able to compete with them. It's why they are lobbying governments around the world to allow only them to be kings of AI. Rapidly closing off any new Reddit data, or access to old data for new upstarts, would explain why there was such short notice.

Now, does this completely stop the ability to train on Reddit data? No. Web scraping is certainly always an option, but that's a lot more computationally expensive on the front and back-end, the data will be very dirty (more computational work), and Reddit can combat this with de-indexing techniques. For the data sizes that OpenAI, or other seeking to make a GPT-like LLM, use for training their AI, web scraping likely isn't feasible for the whole of Reddit.

It should be mentioned too that this doesn't have to be the only reason for Reddit to make these changes. It still shuts down 3rd party apps and forces (those that remain) to use their ad-ridden stock app, it gives them greater control over how people interact with the site, and now it seems it gives the Reddit admins reason to directly intervene in subreddits to control how they operate after the protests. This combined with making OpenAI/Sam Altman happy, things start to add up.

It kills multiple birds with one stone, if you will.