Thousands of subreddits chose to go dark in an ongoing protest over the company's plan to start charging certain third-party developers to access the site’s data.
Wow. Front page of huffpost.com right now. Interesting…
I’m old enough to have witnessed the early beginnings of the Internet in the 90s - and what’s happening now with the fediverse feels like coming back to its roots.
We may well find that the implosion of Twitter and Reddit - within 6 months of each other - is the beginning of the end for “big tech”. It’s unlikely that it will go away entirely but I do feel a seismic shift happening. I seriously hope that it’s not a false dawn.
I’m commenting from Arch Linux. I made the switch two months ago because I’m fed up with M$. What held me back for years was that I like gaming but thanks to Valve/Steam gaming gets better on Linux on a daily basis.
I love Linux, but in reality it still doesn’t support enough of the software people use. I own a bunch of audio software, and don’t feel like running it on wine or something like that.
Also, even the easiest Linux distros will eventually have an issue that forces you into to using a shell of some sort… I know a lot of people who would not be able to handle that. Also it can be a massive time commitment for troubleshooting.
MacOS is built on BSD, which is like Linux but more arcane (sort of). (Edit: also the Android kernel is a Linux kernel). If you don’t find yourself using the shell in MacOS (or Android), it’s because they’ve done the work to make it unnecessary. The command line is still there, and can still be used to fix (or cause) problems.
The companies developing your audio software release it for Windows or Mac because that’s what the users are running. If the majority of their users were running Linux, they would be releasing Linux binaries.
As for being more reliable… it depends on your use case. Around 79% of all publicly accessible servers on the internet run something Unix-like, with about 38% of the total being Linux. Windows is used for about 21%. In my sysadmin work, I use Windows when it’s mandated by the software (again, because the developers chose to release for Windows only, not because the software is fundamentally tied to it), and Linux everywhere else. Reliability is a big part of that decision.
When I moved to Lemmy and learned about how federated sites like this work I realized how utterly impossible for something like what’s happening to Reddit to happen. The biggest obstacle to Reddit users migrating right now is the fact that there’s no equivalently sized community to move to.
That would never be the case here. In addition to defederating like you mentioned, users not in the instance in question could easily set up an alternative community, as easy as it would be to open a new sub. Users in the instance in question could easily migrate to another instance. No need to find an alternative platform, no need to make a new account (in most cases), and no need to worry about a new community being active and well established.
While I see downsides to the fediverse, I see some major upsides, especially in the wake of Reddit’s implosion.
I’m old enough to have witnessed the early beginnings of the Internet in the 90s - and what’s happening now with the fediverse feels like coming back to its roots.
We may well find that the implosion of Twitter and Reddit - within 6 months of each other - is the beginning of the end for “big tech”. It’s unlikely that it will go away entirely but I do feel a seismic shift happening. I seriously hope that it’s not a false dawn.
Not the end of big tech. You’re likely posting from MacOS or Windows and using services like AWS, Azure, or GCP on the sites you use and abuse.
The end of centralized social media though? I hope so.
I’m commenting from Arch Linux. I made the switch two months ago because I’m fed up with M$. What held me back for years was that I like gaming but thanks to Valve/Steam gaming gets better on Linux on a daily basis.
I love Linux, but in reality it still doesn’t support enough of the software people use. I own a bunch of audio software, and don’t feel like running it on wine or something like that.
Also, even the easiest Linux distros will eventually have an issue that forces you into to using a shell of some sort… I know a lot of people who would not be able to handle that. Also it can be a massive time commitment for troubleshooting.
Sadly Windows and macOS are (more) reliable
MacOS is built on BSD, which is like Linux but more arcane (sort of). (Edit: also the Android kernel is a Linux kernel). If you don’t find yourself using the shell in MacOS (or Android), it’s because they’ve done the work to make it unnecessary. The command line is still there, and can still be used to fix (or cause) problems.
The companies developing your audio software release it for Windows or Mac because that’s what the users are running. If the majority of their users were running Linux, they would be releasing Linux binaries.
As for being more reliable… it depends on your use case. Around 79% of all publicly accessible servers on the internet run something Unix-like, with about 38% of the total being Linux. Windows is used for about 21%. In my sysadmin work, I use Windows when it’s mandated by the software (again, because the developers chose to release for Windows only, not because the software is fundamentally tied to it), and Linux everywhere else. Reliability is a big part of that decision.
What flavour of Arch are you using?
Someone will try to monetize the fediverse. They may not be successful, but they’ll try.
There are probably plenty of ways to do it…but most of the ones I can think of involve catering services to users directly, which is fine with me.
capitalism world we live in
Oh 100%. The beauty is if they try in a way that is harmful to the fediverse at large they will get defederated in a heartbeat.
When I moved to Lemmy and learned about how federated sites like this work I realized how utterly impossible for something like what’s happening to Reddit to happen. The biggest obstacle to Reddit users migrating right now is the fact that there’s no equivalently sized community to move to.
That would never be the case here. In addition to defederating like you mentioned, users not in the instance in question could easily set up an alternative community, as easy as it would be to open a new sub. Users in the instance in question could easily migrate to another instance. No need to find an alternative platform, no need to make a new account (in most cases), and no need to worry about a new community being active and well established.
While I see downsides to the fediverse, I see some major upsides, especially in the wake of Reddit’s implosion.
As long as 1 server doesn’t become too dominant. At least, that’s how I understand it.
On the path to become synonymous with AOL