Maybe that’s the actual value they’re watching, did you ever think of that, Mr. Pessimist?

(Sorry, junior dev somewhere out there. I tried.)

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Does Slashdot still have value? I read Slashdot way back in the '90s and early '00s.

Cheap API access was letting the AI platforms pull Reddit data directly via API. That’s why the “fix” was making API access expensive, so that buying the data from Reddit instead becomes the more cost-effective solution.

Reddit’s not (as) worried about gathering more data to sell, they’re worried about selling the years of data they already have.

Tell me you’ve never worked in tech support without telling me you’ve never worked in tech support.

Using a backend service provides things like synchronization, which is useful to me. Previously, I was using Feedly as that backend, but FreshRSS let me self-host that functionality and was pretty trivial to setup and start using.

Part of my Reddit exodus plan was to get serious about my RSS setup.

I’ve settled on:

• FreshRSS as my feed manager (supported by Reeder app in iOS and MacOS)
• FiveFilters Full Text extractor
• rss-proxy site scraper

I may experiment with some replacements for rss-proxy, as I’ve run into a couple sites it doesn’t scrape well, but FreshRSS and FiveFilters have been smashing successes.

Hard pass. The only reason I use Meta at all is because they acquired Instagram, and I’m barely on there as it is (but my family members are).

In the browser. It’s not confusing to me, but I’m a software developer. Millions of Twitter users aren’t going to make it past the server selection step. And many that do are going to be confused when they click to Follow someone and get a weird popup (because that someone is on a different Mastodon instance) instead of instantly following the person.

It’s nowhere close to a smooth enough experience for the lion’s share of Twitter users to transition over. I think people that are used to even slightly technical things vastly overestimate what the average end user is capable of handling. These are the people that ask for help to plug in an HDMI cable.

There (likely) won’t be any reconsideration. Reddit’s concern right now isn’t the health of its communities. They’re focused on taking the ball of data they’re sitting on and selling it to AI platforms while the AI gold rush is still happening.

Mastodon has a long way to go in the onboarding experience. Most non-technical Twitter users simply will not engage with Mastodon in its current form.

Mastodon right now reminds me of email before web-based services. It’s not friendly enough to pull in the “normies”. It needs a Gmail.