Gregory's ServerPeople don't realize that Reddit *used* to be open source. https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
 54 comments
@atomicpoet I had forgotten about that. Slashdot made that the cool thing to do in the before time. I guess there’s not a lot of incentive to do that anymore, with the plethora of modern web frameworks to choose from. @atomicpoet Now it's owned by Condé Nast I think? I'm still waiting for a glossy, hardcover coffee table book collection of AskReddit threads. Money maker right there.  Another thing people find surprising: Self-hosted Reddit servers used to be commonplace. Now imagine if ActivityPub existed when Reddit was open source. Well, we don't have to imagine it. There's Lemmy. But my point is that every self-hosted Reddit install could have been federated if ActivityPub existed back then. Of course, even if Reddit was still open source and supported ActivityPub, I'd probably prefer Lemmy since they use an AGPL license. @atomicpoet In a way, it sounds like Reddit changed from Mastodon into Twitter. It’s just another Big Social company now. Wait until they go public as a company and have to answer to shareholders. I have a feeling it’s going to get ugly there. @Sanlear I don't think a comparison of Twitter with Mastodon works: 1. Reddit has always been for-profit, Mastodon is non-profit @atomicpoet Fair points. It wasn’t a great analogy. In some ways Reddit has improved over the years. As you noted earlier they have strong mod tools. They’ve gotten rid of some truly vile subreddits. But at the end of the day, as a profit oriented company, Redditors are the product. Reddit’s increasing its reliance on ads. And I feel that it will only get worse after the inevitable IPO.  @atomicpoet you could take the slashdot source and do the same. Or Scoop! Talk about ancient. But the question is: why? @atomicpoet but that ignores the question and just punts it over to the next guy. My point about asking why is that it's a question techies almost never ask. Because the nerd-o-sphere believes there is a technical solution to every human problem. A utopian idea going back to the 80s. See: MIT AI lab. And CMU. This Whole Net Catalog stuff has roots in 60s idealism but came to fruition in the 2010s and turned out to be dystopian. @ParanoidFactoid What I want to know is "What exactly are you asking?" Because I'm currently not sure. @atomicpoet Why? Why would the owners of media monopolies ever federate? It isn't in their best interest. Why should federated sites use moderation tools designed by for profits to curate to the whims of advertisers and owners' political goals? What problem do you wish to solve and how will the tools you propose not make things worse? Because they sure made it worse at Reddit. @ParanoidFactoid Well, yeah. I agree that media monopolies would prefer never to federate. I've said many times previously, and I talk about that a lot. Anyway, my point isn't to say, "Let's emulate Reddit!" -- just that this existed, imagine if it was also federated. Hope that clarifies things. Take care! @atomicpoet hey, you got some relevant and useful counter-commentary in here and I'd encourage you to reread it sometime. I don't want to change your mind or argue to prove you wrong. And I still want to follow you because you say interesting things. So, nothing personal. And it's the idea under discussion, not you or me. Thanks for posting. @atomicpoet Thanks! Looks like compelling evidence that community and worker-owned social media is a necessary complement to open-source and open-standards. Open-Source can always be killed by shareholder-oriented boards who are less interested in building a commons than they are extracting wealth from whatever activities they've captured. @atomicpoet I'm heading into a tangent here, and you may not have time to respond, but I'm wondering, if anyone knows... There are people who scrape content off reddit, copying it out of threads. Then they use that content (individuals' posts) to create Youtube videos, around specific topics, with machine reading of the text. For entertainment and monetization purposes. Could that be done with people's posts here? Just curious. Wondering if setting privacy to unlisted could be a deterrent. @Mimi Yes, but you there's no universal search here for content discovery. And you can also delete your posts after a set time. @atomicpoet Coulda been federated anyways. AP is one method of federation, and it's not even close to the best. We're already seeing the flaws in AP become more of a problem as Mastodon becomes more popular. @pixelherodev AP is definitely not the best, but it's the one people actually use. Hopefully, there's now a chance to build other protocols and even integrate them with the Fediverse. @atomicpoet lemmy? what's that? googling doesn't help much here, maybe it's obscure or something. @atomicpoet The bit that ticked me off at the time was they said they just couldn't keep the source open - 'too much effort', or some nonsense, as if pushing to a public git repo were challenging. @atomicpoet @karstenbondy I remember when reddit was run out of Spez's bedroom in Somerville and was written in spaghetti LISP. They used to party in Davis Square.  @atomicpoet Wonder who broke that, and when? Because I hadn't any clue, either, until you posted that.  I've never encountered an open source Reddit server (presumably they may have existed at one point?) - only seen the commercial site (and never used it) @vfrmedia @cambridgeport90 I've encountered them. They were easy to find back in 2007, when link aggregation was *the* most popular way to use social media. @atomicpoet @vfrmedia I wonder why no one has kept up the aggregation, then? Seems like it should be easy considering they didn't wipe the code off the map, like they should have, if they were really trying to monetize it. @cambridgeport90 @vfrmedia By the way, I can write another whole thread about the rise and fall of link aggregation. Until the 2010s, clicking links was considered "fun". Now it's considered, at best, as work. At worst, a threat to safety. @atomicpoet @vfrmedia Then I guess I'm the minority, because I love viewing people's actual site.   |
@atomicpoet No, I certainly didn't know that!