True Blue

To any mods facing similar pressure: you can implement ridiculous rules. Like how Reddit is fine with r/Superbowl deleting any post that isn’t a picture of an owl.

I think this is a clever way to get around Admin threats, but how would you communicate to the users that the point of ridiculous rules is because you’re not supposed to be there, rather than it being because you’re power-tripping? I guess the simple answer would be that you DON’T, since the users who are protesting as well probably aren’t on Reddit anyway, and so this is really just a way to punish the scabs.

I can definitely see name-collisions being an issue, where communities on different instances have the same community “ID”, but aren’t actually about the same thing. I’m still overall in favor of the basic idea though.

In my view this isn’t the end of Reddit, but it is the beginning of the end. This situation will probably pass, but the lemmy devs and instance owners have already gotten useful feedback about how to handle situations like this, and what kinds of things would help lemmy and the fediverse grow. The next time something like this happens (and there will be a next time) they’ll be just that little bit more ready.

Although for me specifically, I don’t actually care too much if Reddit dies. I’m happy as long as there’s a community here. The best thing that seems to be coming out of this situation so far is that many subreddits are now getting lemmy community analogs for people to move to.

That’s what I’ve been trying to do myself. I’m really not an interactive kind of person on these online communities. I’m almost always a lurker, but I’m really trying to push myself to be more active, because I want an open-source and federated Reddit alternative (and ActivityPub in general) to succeed!

I’m really interested in the idea of these different kinds of websites being interoperable because of ActivityPub. Like the different websites are basically different frontends for people who prefer link aggregators or micro-blogs or other kinds of websites. It’s a really cool idea!

A suggestion I’ve seen is to add reddit.com to your ublock origin “my filters” page. It works great for me!

I have an account, but I don’t really use it much. Not because I don’t like it, but because I don’t have much to say really. I’m more of the lurker type.

The important thing about Matrix is to think of it like email. Homeservers are like your email provider, like Hotmail or Gmail or Protonmail. You look for a homeserver, then you just make an account on that homeserver. The “main” homeserver is matrix.org, but it’s recommended not to make an account on there if you can avoid it. Remember that making accounts on these homeservers is free, so there’s no reason not to make accounts on a few of them to try out.

The other thing to think about is your matrix client. This is similar to an IRC client or an email app. Luckily, this matter even less than the homeservers since you can freely switch between these anytime with basically no issues. If none catch your eye, Element is the sort of “reference implementation” so you can just try that one if you want. It has a web version too: https://app.element.io

There’s some cool more advanced features like spaces and threads, but you don’t have to worry about those much at first.

Federation definitely feels like the next major stepping stone of the internet’s evolution. Protocols like ActivityPub and Matrix feel like a bit of a “new beginning” for communities on the internet.