Gregory's ServerNow 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.
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23 comments
@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. |
Of course, even if Reddit was still open source and supported ActivityPub, I'd probably prefer Lemmy since they use an AGPL license.