Pumpkin

Reddit is nothing without users posting and upvoting posts and comments. If all, or a large proportion of the users stopped using the site, reddit would have to listen or they’d stop being useful. I think there are two problems:

1. As you said, users don’t realize the power they have. It’s a bit more nuanced than that, they do realize the power of the collective, but don’t think the collective will exercise that power, and thus won’t act individually. It’s the same as “my vote doesn’t matter, it’s just one vote”. This is obviously a self-fulfilling prophecy because they are making it happen, they simply need to follow what they think is right.

2. A lot of users don’t care. Again, a bit more nuanced than that, most users probably have a preference reddit listens to their users, keeps the 3rd party app access, etc. But they don’t care enough to do anything about it, which in effect means in any practical way, they don’t care. I’m guessing that to them this feels a bit of a “niche” problem and will use the official app. There are a small amount of users, like me and probably you reading this who’ve left reddit and won’t go back.

The protests have worked. They’ve moved a motivated minority over to lemmy and we’re creating communities, posts and comments, contributing to apps and running instances. We’ll spend our time and effort improving the tools and communities for the fediverse ready. Hopefully, with enough of reddit being reddit causing more waves of people in the future to seek another platform, the fediverse will grow and reddit will dwindle. That’s my hope anyway.

It’s not so much of an analogy, email actually is a federated technology just like ActivityPub is and ActivityPub works a lot like email and has audience targeting fields which map onto the same audience targeting fields that email has (to, cc, etc.). Activities aren’t always publicly available, although they can be and when sent to specific people, they are delivered to another users inbox (although if public they can be read from a user’s outbox).

Wow, I am surprised they would go this far if I’m honest.

We’ve looked at the user data and carrots just aren’t that popular, so it doesn’t make sense to keep supporting them. We’re working on a new vegetable which we hope to show off sometime new next.

To some degree, you’re right, reddit probably won’t change regardless of what mods do. If they really are feeling the blackout, as you’d say they’ll probably just replace the moderators and open the community back up, rather than reverse their decision.

However, I feel like it’s reddit doing the disservice to their users, not mods who are taking action by protesting. Ultimately, and if reddit do replace the mods and try and continue as normal, then it sends a stronger message to the community that reddit doesn’t care about or respect them and it’s not a not a good place to continue being.

In the dynamic between reddit the company running the site and the users, there is limited power users have against reddit which holds a lot of power, but protesting like what’s happening now one of the main tools users have.

Really appreciate these links! I’ve been curious to see what he’s been saying but didn’t want to give them any traffic.

Here are some I find really useful:

• Jellyfin (media interface)
• paperless-ng (document store with OCR, tagging, search, etc.)
• Miniflux (RSS reader)