Seeing more “cake days” pop up lately, it seems we’re approaching (or in) the 1 yr anniversary of the Reddit migration.
It’s kinda sweet actually that we all get this reminder of it with the pickup in “cakedays”.
It reminds of my seeing the wave happen. I was on lemmy before the migration (not a flex, I joined mastodon in the twitter migration and explored the other fediverse platforms around looking for a reddit/forum alternative) … and followed a bunch of communities over on my mastodon account. Early last year many of these communities were fairly quiet (or at least quieter than now) and so I didn’t really see any of them in my mastodon feed. I’d actually forgotten that I’d followed them. I’d heard word about the API stuff over on Reddit, but I knew something was happening when I started seeing more and more posts in my masto feed that confused me … it wasn’t clear where they were coming from. Double checking I’d see that they came from lemmy communities I’d forgotten about … and I realised I was seeing lemmy literally come alive!
All these cakedays are kinda the same thing … a sort of internet equivalent of a weather event or season.
Without knowing the financial history of the place, it seems a good case study in something that could have gone for the sustainable stalwart of the internet path but instead fell to the dark silicon valley profit/growth side of things. With wikipedia being the only great success (AFAIK) at forging solid and sustainable foundations for the internet, I suppose the lesson is that it has to be non-profit, or open-source (or both) from the beginning.
In a way, it is kinda on many of us for not realising this and pushing against it sooner.
One of the great things coming out of the fediverse (and bluesky too at the moment) is all of the open software being developed that will hopefully plant seeds that will last a long time.
It absolutely is imho. Like at some point it was not social media as it became later, following (well, attempting to) the financial success of Facebook and Twitter/X, and instead people could submit long-form answers to questions, rather than merely vomit their feelings into the never-ending stream of others doing the same.
etc.
By deprioritizing people finding answers and instead encouraging them to make new posts all on their own to ask the question yet again, over & over, spez tried to make money and enshittified Reddit by taking it away from its original purpose that had given it such a reputation for being great.
So it’s not “having ads” that destroyed it, but the chasing after ad revenue at all costs that was driving it into the dirt. Even before the protests revealed that starkly to us all that the Reddit we had known and use to love was dead - spez had stolen it, he took our efforts and that ad-bloated, authoritatian-modded corpse was what was leftover. And it wasn’t even bc of profits alone, but greed in chasing short-term profits above all else, including long-term profits. Aka capitalism killed it.