This past few months I’ve gotten into Trackmania. It really is the perfect “settle down for the evening and play with a video on the other monitor”. I can just grind out records, while only needing two fingers max on my keyboard, and just enough attention.

A part of me believes they will give some bs reason to keep their “scab” mods immune, but I would love if they didn’t and the chaos that would ensue.

Its both a value add and a negative. For those more focused on their own community (Like beehaw) it’s an obvious positive. But for many users, losing access to certain communities on your own instance of choice is going to be a negative. I personally don’t blame Beehaw for favoring the former. I think improved moderation tools and more granular federation would at least make the move less of a blow to users.

To be honest, 2023 has feel relatively calmer than the past few, I guess covid being that all encompassing to life. Of the things on your list I do think AI is probably the first thing that comes to mind when I think of what we are “on the brink of”. This leap that happened the past couple years in LLM was shocking enough, wondering what the next couple are going to look like.

To be honest, I had such low expectations for the blackout, I’m actually surprised how much impact it did have. This was never going to be the reddit killer. There is a reason why the 1% principle exists. Most people don’t care, and most people who do aren’t going to actually put in the effort to change their browsing habits. It’s part of why being an early member of new sites like these are the best, because the people joining are the people who are actively seeking out new communities.

Yup, exactly. Welcome to the fediverse!

There is traction, and in fact already a fix in review.

Ironically, still some issues with the federation, so we can see them but they can’t see us. We’re in the walls.

Ernest might have also gotten up more servers to handle the load, noticing that cloudflare is off and we are federating again (this is a beehaw thread)

There are so many ways they could have made it viable. Like comically easy. But that was never what they were interested in. The thing that they aren’t willing to just come out and say, is that their own app is built to generate advertising revenue. They have absolutely zero interest in fostering a 3rd party community, and the only concessions they are going to make are for things that actually have a chance at saving the spending money (i.e. make sure the free labor they get from moderators stays and make sure other people deal with questions like accessibility).

I’m sure there are some people purchasing those, but you also get some for free. Looks like I have 800 worth I could give out.

Yes and no, as a 12 year vet.

Reddit is not what it was when I joined. Back in the early 2010’s reddit really felt like the internet’s evolution from forums. Not going to pretend it was the first, but it really did feel like something was special about it. The community aspect was really important back then. All of the sudden, it felt like you could literally build a community around anything, with little effort, and the “Build it and they will come” factor would kick in.

But things have spoiled since then. We have over a decade worth of “Eternal Septembers”, and being a redditor turned into “being a redditor” has turned into, we’ll it’s just another part of social media infrastructure. Pretty much everybody I know who has use the site has basically sectioned themselves off from using the site as a a whole and just have their specific subs that they browse. I’m a programmer so I basically just use it for the programming subs and different games I play like OSRS, Factorio, etc.

And I guess, a last thought, I don’t think reddit is going to die from this. I would wager the vast majority of the userbase really doesn’t give a shit, and to be honest, that is fine. Like I said, reddit is part of internet social infrastructure at this point. It’s probably still going to be useful to prefix google searches with “reddit some product” to find the best human reviews of that product. But for me, I don’t really feel the need to keep using it day to day. I’m looking for a community and I can find it elsewhere.

Though this will take some time getting used to.

I literally just joined. I think the major instances should put some sort of “Reddit Refugee Guide”. I just joined on kbin, and I’m pretty technical so I’m naturally interested in how things work and figuring it out myself, but I think the vast majority of people won’t be, and will just want to know how they can do the basic social media features.

CGP Grey’s “What is reddit” comes to mind.