from FineCoatMummy@sh.itjust.works to privacy@lemmy.ml on 01 Nov 21:42
https://sh.itjust.works/post/69275614
Github redlib thread still unfolding. From reddit shareholder letter,
And a key piece of work to retain new audiences is shifting Reddit to a logged-in-only experience.
Most on lemmy know the privacy and bot-infested dumpster fire reddit is. So it’s very easy to think good riddance. But that misses an important point. IMO.
Inspite of the dumpster fire, it also contains a huge body of knowledge not found anywhere else. Example. Many times I have searched for a super obscure error message and the only good hits were a reddit thread in a tech sub. This is formerly open knowledge, accessible privately, now being closed and locked behind logins.
In old web forum days, weird niche info was distributed all over. That made it robust. Big tech social media displaced most of that world. It all got centralized. No matter hjow awful their algorithms are, no matter how toxic, those sites do have riches of knowledge.
We ARE losing something, if open access to niche info created by normal ppl is cut off.
“Ppl will figure a way around” you may say. There is no way to win that fight in the long run.
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I guess redlib could use a login cookie with a dumb reddit account ? Less privacy focused but still accesible without all the bload and stupid ads.
There’s a fork that does exactly this already. It works but yeah it kind of eliminates the point.
Yah … I think it eliminates the point if it requires a per-user login. And if they try to put it all behind a common login, then brackled@lemmy.world’s point enters the picture. Reddit will cut it off. Or make it so rate limited to be useless for that.
There might always be some way to get a little data out. But it can become so painful, so limited, to be almost useless.
Thousands of people all browsing the site from the same account? Yeah Reddit would pick up on and ban that in a heartbeat.
It would likely have to have a large pool of accounts and randomly pick one per request, to avoid Reddit noticing a too-high volume of requests from one account.
IMO, there might be something to that idea. It would have to be a huge pool, and it would be endless whack a mole as reddit etc get better at detecting automated traffic patterns. The more requests, the bigger the pool has to be.
Reddit is very good at detecting multiple accts using dev fingerprinting, which they could do here too. It might be hard to have a big pool and keep it alive.
In theory, I think it might work. Esp with heavy caching. In practice, IDK. There’d be challenges for sure.
There is a fork that also incorporates small browser to scrape reddit directly. No cookies needed but UX gets a hit(poster names censored until opening the post, not all comments loaded at once, search not working, 403 errors).
This is the reason I don’t like discord (alongside its lack of privacy, ownership).
I am aware they announced recently that the info will now be searchable (for servers that allow), but I consider it an information black hole.
So many people decide to use it and all that information is not searchable. It’s also lost if discord ever desires it, or the server admin bans you, or wtv.
Moving to a more open internet has to come from the masses, but the masses like Facebook so here we are.
What I really don’t like about discord is I have to have an account to use it and I can’t separate my accounts across spaces.
I might be part of some really weird spaces I do not want remotely associate with open source or even professional discussion and support groups. Why those tins are on discord I don’t know, but they are.
100%. Your frustration is mine too.
I don’t think the masses like Facebook. I think they hate it, and hate reddit’s new policies. But they’re also distracted / lazy and ignorant and neither understand the alternatives, nor are willing to invest time to discover and learn to use them. I’m also very sure the average person scores significantly lower on both intellectual curiosity and reading comprehension than the average Lemmy user.
When Trump 2.0 started, there was a massive uptick in people attempting to learn about cyber privacy, public infrastructure and other was to be safer and more in control of their digital lives. But most of them couldn’t sustain it and it petered out after about 8 months. It will probably surge back if fascism does massive, rapid bullshit, but as long as they keep turning up the temperature slowly, the frog will just boil to death while doomscrolling and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.
FTFY
I think the way Cory Doctorow put it is Facebook is betting people love their friends and family more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg.
The use case of Discord is not meant to be open… it is meant to provide a chat room hidden from the public. That is the whole point of Discord or other chat clients like that.
It is like choosing to ask your friend whether they can help you, that isn’t open information either.
Agreed. But that’s not all is being used for. Many tutorials, guides and who knows what else are in discord servers.
I generally agree with your sentiment. But let’s see some possibly positive sides at the same time:
People say stuff like this all the time. History tells us that will not happen. There was a sitewide protest when they killed the API but no one left. History tells us there is fucking nothing these social media corporations can do to get people to leave. Because they have tried over and over again in recent years and it always fails. Maybe 1% finds somewhere else to spend their time.
E: you people need to familiarize yourself with the concept of hyperbole. I wasn’t looking for your anecdotes.
I literally left when they killed the API.
Me too. There are dozens of us! Dozens!
One more here!
Same :) At first I just wanted to have an alternative to Reddit. More like a backup in case it gets worse. Then I realized that I was browsing Lemmy more often so I deleted my Reddit account and here we are. I’m the first generation who was on facebook. Then our parents joined and we moved to Twitter. After Musk ruined that we fled to Reddit and now Lemmy.
How do we know for sure? The site is infested with bots that may create traffic to compensate the activity by the actual human users, who fleed their service. Afaik even spaz confirmed that most of the traffic on Reddit is generated by bots.
More recently, I’ve seen tons of comments about Proton that seemed like numerous copies of the same idea shared with less than one minute intervals. It detinitely felt suspicious when reading similar ideas time and time again.
Because despite what everyone says, bots are still very easy to spot, and aren’t capable of creating the type of high quality submissions that keeps users there. And because I talk to people IRL every day that still use it. I’m yet to meet anyone in person who knows what the fediverse is.
i left
Cool!
I’m no one important and I left. I think a lot of people are fed up with being monetized at every turn.
If there really are more bots than real people participating as others claim, then the real people are going somewhere. Maybe they will stumble in here.
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
Before the API protest, Lemmy had less than 1000 Monthly Active Users. Right after the protests, it shot up to just under 70,000 and then settled down to around 38,000 users. It currently has around 31,000 Monthly Active Users with another 7,000 between Piefed and Mbin.
then: <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/92f35867-11cc-4985-96cd-c7a9285e26c9.jpeg">
now: https://fedidb.com/software/lemmy
Oh well only a hundred million to go!
A lot of us don’t want to be in a community with millions of people. Some people like stadiums, other people like cafes.
Well then why are we having this conversation?
I feel like someone needs to create a bot farm to advertise Lemmy all over Reddit. Not specific instances, just Lemmy as an alternative. What’s one more bot spamming the site.
Nothing?
I have been on Lemmy for years after they blocked apps.
It is called getting a spine and sticking to their principles.
I lost sympathy for those that keep persisting with that shit hole for all kinds of excuses.
That is not true. I made a Lemmy account around the time they started fucking with the API, if I remember correctly. I wasn’t that active here because I felt like the content was very limited and the people too radical.
Now that my Reddit account has been restricted because “you need to verify your age” 🤡 Not just NSFW stuff restricted, the whole site is restricted for my account. Can’t even access my account settings anymore. (I really should figure something out but alas I care too little).
That’s why I have become more active here. No other options.
Information wants to be free
Looking forward to freeing up a couple more hours of my week!
But seriously, finding search results of use is going to be even more painful.
Why isn’t lemmy searchable?
It is. And many even popular search engine searches will give results from a lemmy instance.
It is, searchable, isn’t it?
At least the app I’m using does have a search function, and it works…
As for search engines, it’s searchable there too, there’s just no much point in filtering by site because… which site?
Search engines could add a specific “search only on the fediverse” filter, but they’re too busy enshittifying themselves and losing money with unprofitable “AI” “search” to do it…
I hate to sound like I’m victim blaming, but this kinda sounds like a Leopards Ate My Face kind of situation. How can anybody trust Reddit to do what is good for the people that use the site? Anybody who writes software for Reddit must expect that it will be a cat and mouse situation where the community UX is deprioritized to chase money.
In addition to the more utilitarian aspect of Reddit soon-to-be wallgardened, I’m sad that the cultural, community aspect may be as well. While one could argue that certain communities could theoretically be replicated here, it’s just very difficult without significant mass.
Yah, there is that too.
I’ve looked for some niche communities on lemmy. Actually not even very niche lol. Many of them are MIA, or have a bare group with a single post from 2024. You need some mass to get any engagement.
On the other hand. Mass makes bigger groups go downhill real fast. So a tradeoff I guess.
Is there a tool to download all reddit posts? I didn’t want to delete from reddit because some people might find it useful but now that it’s gated, I wanna move it all to lemmy.
I tried “bulk-downloader-for-reddit” I don’t know how you’ll drop it to lemmy.
This has happened to me on iPhone Safari and Firefox for the past few months. This will seal the deal for me against Reddit.
I hope people learn. Stop using reddit.
How does that fix the issue OP is writing about? The knowledge no longer accessible from a simple web search?
I’m replacing missing knowledge with local LLM. Fuck google, fuck reddit fuck the sponsored search results, fuck all
You don’t fix, you learn and in the future you try not to make the same mistakes. And Reddit is not the only example.
We did this dance with Experts Exchange.
They managed the prefect balance: They left various work-arounds working, so that search would work, and they dwindled to irrelevance while presumably bleeding money.
As plans go, it is reliable.
Even worse is the wealth of knowledge that exists in random discord servers…
At some point, we didn’t even notice, we stopped building a library. :(
“Ooopsie, gotta enclose the commons again!”
Social products and resources can’t remain accessible to all of society, where’s the profit in that?