Reddit is DOWN for thousands of users

paf0@lemmy.world to Reddit@lemmy.world – 369 points –
Reddit is DOWN for thousands of users
dailymail.co.uk
167

Reddit being down is how I found out about this place. This is literally my first post here. Thanks for sucking Reddit!

Welcome, hope you like Linux memes…and beans.

Hey that's not fair!

.....we've also got Star Trek memes.

Don't forget to apply to the No Poop Challenge!

Jokes aside, welcome. It's a bit messy but fun here. Make sure to take a look at how instances work, for most part you can ignore it but it does improve a lot your experience.

The top two mistakes I ever made on the Fediverse were unknowingly posting in Chapotraphouse in hexbear.net, and similarly in Lemmygrad.ml. Lemmy was practically unusable for me until I realized I could block those instances (and later lemmy.ml), which improved my happiness here by >99%, no joke.

Definitely it's worth paying attention to how instances work.

I'm the same way.. I don't like to block people because I want to know what everybody's saying... But I had to block hex bear. I normally just scroll all and they were everywhere all the time everyday and it just got too much.

I used to be quite proud of myself for never blocking anyone on Reddit, ever. Also I was a mod of a couple of gaming subs, so it wouldn't have worked in those anyway:-). But eventually I realized... it wasn't helping my state of mind, and rather it was affecting my irl relationships too. So I stepped back from modding, and finally blocked a particularly onerous troll account that I did not want to ban as a mod, but I sure did enjoy blocking him as a normal user.:-)

There's a saying about the only thing we must not tolerate is intolerance, and it doesn't quite go far enough imho as to state the consequences of failing to block intolerance - that they drag us down to become more like them:-(.

and finally blocked a particularly onerous troll account that I did not want to ban as a mod, but I sure did enjoy blocking him as a normal user.:-)

Just for curiosity, what was the troll doing?

I got a few of them from my Reddit mod times too, but since I was moderating smaller subs I had some freedom to tweak the rules towards their behaviour. (Because if I'm getting annoyed by the troll, odds are that other members are too.)

Standard troll (like toddler) stuff: pushing boundaries to see just exactly how far they could go, while stopping just inside the stated rules.

The reason I didn't ban him is that his trolling was directed almost solely at me as the mod, but to the rest of the community he was actually quite helpful, and even somewhat kind 95% of the time. Some kind of problem with authority I suppose, even though I'd previously offered him my mod position but he turned it down.

We all have bad seasons in life, and I shudder to think what he went through during the pandemic. Not that it matters bc behavior is always a choice - Hitler's home life surely wasn't fantastic either - but by way of explanation, I do wonder how much the pandemic encouraged trolling on the internet world-wide (most likely: it simply became the latest in a very long like of reasons). And anyway, he was definitely this way before that started, so at best it would be an exaggerating factor.

He seemed good at masking behaviors, thus overall he was better for the community than he was annoying. And it was a small community (at least among regular posters) to begin with. And I was getting super annoyed by the game itself, and by Reddit, so rather than kick him out I stepped down as mod (I had been training someone already, and a prior mod returned from before the pandemic, so it was in good hands) and left the sub myself instead, and now there's "peace" over there:-).

Urgh, the complicated type. When the user is just plain bad you ban them, when the user is mostly good you leave them alone, but when it's mixed this way no matter what you do you feel like you did the wrong thing.

I get why you simply blocked him though - it feels sensible in this case.

I do wonder how much the pandemic encouraged trolling on the internet world-wide

My granny would say that "an empty mind is the Devil's workshop". I think that's the case with the pandemics, a lot of people were stuck at home with too little to do, too little to think about.

To be honest my own troll Reddit account saw far more activity during the pandemic. (I avoided making it personal against anyone there though - I had more fun taunting whole circlejerks instead.) But by then I wasn't a mod any more for years.

It was actually really instructive to me to watch the evolution of his antagonizing efforts towards me, as he allowed himself to get radicalized elsewhere. What is worse is that he knew better - i.e. the reason he cited to me when I offered to step down and let him take over was that he was not emotionally suited to it, but thereafter not only did he not step up, he also refused to step back, and instead inflicted his assaults upon the entire community (to the point people were making memes out of our back-and-forth exchanges, which we tried to keep to removed posts that if you recall in Reddit remained publicly-accessible for anyone that had the URL but was not shown on the feed anymore) - he wouldn't even relegate them to our DMs, despite how we had communicated that way in the past. In part that may be b/c Reddit DMs suck ass, but also I think it was in large part theater, as he seemed to be performing for the sake of approval by some tankies on a Discord server. I continually offered them my mod position as well - b/c they had been with the game for several years and knew it exceedingly well, whereas I was a relative new-comer to it; also they were in charge of the fan wiki as well - but it seems that they had much more fun belittling my relative inexperience, yet refused to do any actual work of their own to make things better, i.e. modding.

I am sure you know about Ian Danskin's (the guy who does Innuendo Studios) The Alt Right Playbook, but he also has a series titled "Why Are You So Angry" that perfectly describes the situation, which occurs so often among young gamers who unbeknownst to them are being radicalized, both by one another as a normal part of the young male angst, but also not entirely untouched by foreign powers who used that to literally get Trump elected and thereby benefit themselves.

And yes, then covid too, plus now the MAGA movement that took many of those principles to such great effect has expanded to include women, and somehow black and jews and LGBQI and even trans people, despite how incongruous all of that seems to anyone who pays attention to "facts", that Trump isn't goint to somehow change his tune and support them in return...

I'm out of the loop on the meta despite being active on the platform. What's the deal with those other two servers? I can see they have strong "personalities".

They have some... interesting political viewpoints, that is for sure. The thing is, regardless of that, it's like a self-styled "alpha" person who looks down on everything that they refuse to understand themselves - they dish out an insane amount of criticism (that's the literal sole purpose of a place like ChapoTrapHouse, read its very own community statement of purpose), yet cannot handle even the slightest wisp of not even criticism but honest questioning in return (anything less than obsequiousness right off the bat).

They are often derogatorily called "tankies", due to how they believe in the conspiracy theory that no casualties occured at Tiananmen Square, ignoring all the videos, photos, and first-hand accounts from people who were actually there. Also, Russia and China are "communist", more importantly are "not" doing genocide, and instead it is the USA that is doing "genocide", not just supporting others doing it but directly I mean, as best I can tell meaning for the reason that it is capitalist and that somehow capitalism = genocide (but again, their preferred nations are "not" capitalistic, nor "doing genocide" in their minds, in complete defiance of all facts otherwise, most especially those experienced first-hand by e.g. someone who directly lost a family member to such).

But again, their political viewpoints aren't the main thing, it's what that reveals about how they approach the world. i.e., consent does not matter - or rather, it must but only when directed at them, yet never in reverse. i.e. remember that style of logic that stopped working for you when you were 5 years old? ("I know you are but what am I?") Yeah, they are still using that - and somehow it works!? Also styles that tbf have baffled experts for years, like gish gallop and reverse gish gallop, etc.

And since they have existed in echo chambers for many years now, they actually believe this stuff. The problem is, they also still believe it when they leave those echo chambers and come over here, to "leave their mark" upon any conversation that doesn't go 100% their way. You'll see it yourself soon enough - if you haven't already - though Lemmy.World already defederates the worst of them, lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net. As I mentioned, you might also want to block lemmy.ml.

Also, Innuendo Studios has a cool video series about these matters, titled "Why Are You So Angry", and then another much better one albeit a bit less related so for this topic more of a follow-up after that one, titled "The Alt-Right Playbook" if you want to follow up further, but basically it's a super-deep rabbit hole that ultimately may literally end democracy on earth, on the one hand, but also it affects how much we are allowed or not allowed to talk about things on the internet too, without huge push-back from bullies.

Don’t forget to apply to the No Poop Challenge!

what

It's a local meme.

A year ago or so someone posted in AskLemmy "I need to survive for 3 days while pooping as much as possible. I can pee as often as I like. It can take up loads of space. What food do I pack?" Apparently they were serious with the question, but... well, it's bloody hilarious and suddenly everyone was joking about it.

The original thread was deleted, but you see plenty copycat threads like this one.

Wasn’t the I need to not poop the first one? The link posted doesn’t open for me.

You're right - I copied the title of the post without noticing that they flipped it. (I can't find the original any more.)

The link from .ml opens fine for me.

Welcome! Watch out for Hexbear and the .ml instances, lots of disinformation and propaganda

Welcome to Lemmy. Glad to get new people here.

Just a quick FAQ because newbies tend to get some common things wrong:

Q: What is a "community"?

A: A community is basically a subreddit that lives in a specific instance

Q: What are we called in Lemmy?

A: Most people use "lemming"

Q: What is an instance?

A: An instance is basically a server. For example, you registered at lemmy.world. lemmy.world is an instance. With the power of federation, you don't need to register at other fediverse platforms to interact with stuff there here (only applicable to federated AND supported fediverse platforms). For example, mastodon.social can mostly interact with lemmy servers (instances)

Also, don't mind the old looking minimalstic UI of lemmy. A revamp of the UI with a more modern design is being developed as we speak

Any questions welcome.

Reddit.com still works. Old.reddit.com does not.

Wonder if they've decided to finally do away with old reddit?

Edit: Old.reddit is back up for what it's worth.

new.reddit.com still works it seems. I think they're going to take Old.Reddit.com offline, the bastards. If they do that, I may end up back here at Lemmy fulltime. I know none of you want that!

That's the final nail for a lot of people

Not gonna happen. They'll just re-lube the old condom while Reddit rapes them again.

i occasionally use reddit and they've killed new.reddit lol, the new new layout is permanent

Same issue here.

I think it's just a temporary issue, but I really will stop using Reddit if old.reddit.com goes down. There are niches that just aren't on here... but that UI.

The UI is unacceptable and an exercise in everything wrong with modern UI.

I like how much it obsesses over your post's engagement metrics. I feel like that creates toxic incentive's, but... shrug. What do I know?

They are going to use the scrapping of old as the reason why. My apps that scrape it are down.

My how I Wish lemmy was better.

1 more...

Literally thousands. That's all the humans that are left.

Funny how they have the audacity to complain about this place being botted when their bot problem is so, SO much worse.

i dont think i've seen more than 3 botted users here lmao

Yeah there really are not that many here, and while there are probably more who hide in the background, it's nowhere near what the Reddit scabs/stans claim when they talk shit about Lemmy and alternative platforms in general.

'alternative is not 'click 3 buttons', therefore it sucks balls and no one should use it'

When my Lemmy instance is down (which is very rare, much more stable than Reddit), I just browse via a different instance!

Another strength of decentralized social media

It’s beautiful. I’ve been here when world was down and the rest of Lemmy runs business as usual.

I wonder if they try to plan server updates around each other for this reason

Who cares? Reddit has historically had a ton of outtages. Why even post this?

I don't get it either. I know a lot of lemmy users have an axe to grind with reddit, but treating every temporary outage like it's dead forever is just bizarre.

It's like honestly delusional behavior. Just a huge echo chamber repeating the same boring shit over and over. It's ironic because one of the reasons that people came to Lemmy was to eacape the Reddit circklejerk culture.

On top of it, this is fucking Daily Mail. They fell for a Daily Mail shock value story.

Yeah back when still used reddit I found myself scrolling through the comments of coping redditters on downdetector.com at least once every couple of months I swear, and I was never even that active

True that. It's incredible how terrible reddit is from the technical point of view. You can clearly see that even if they have good engineers there, they aren't getting any resources to do their job properly.

Think of all the poor bots that can't repost!

In some faraway data center fan noise has reduced somewhat for the duration.

I hope reddit dies

Eventually it will, these for-profit venture capitalist companies always eat themselves sooner or later, it's only a matter of time.

DAILY MAIL is a shit SHIT source.

But fuck reddit.

It's cool you can call stuff out on here. I tried that on Reddit and got banned. Then called out the mods and got banned from the site for harassment 🤷‍♂️

Reddit can't die off fast enough. It's clearly past its prime

Reddit is against free speech and their mods get mad if you disagree with them even if you're right.

Worst part was, it was all really civil I thought. Like, "Hey, this sounds like X but it might be Y"

Turns out the dude was a piece of shit, but still... While I consider myself pretty left leaning, I also like to make sure I've got my fingers pointing in the right direction. Call the piece of shit out for cases where they are without a doubt being a piece of shit. Not for areas where there some room for personal interpretation.

But according to some mods, we should just blast people over anything regardless of verifiability. And trying to further explain the dangers of enforcing nonsense like they're doing is apparently considered harassment.

Their approach:

Me: Appalling the ban, stating the nuance of the post.

Mods: "No, don't contact us again."

Me: Huh? But this, though...
Mods: "No, contact us again and we'll report you for harassment"

Me: I'm all for pointing fingers, but this is dangerous...
"We're muting you now, and also reporting you for harassment"

Reddit admins: "How dare you harass the mods with civil conversation! 7 day ban!"

Me: Appealing Reddit ban, stating the only harassment thus far has been from the mods. Show me where I was harassing.
Human admin: Nope, harassment. Ban staying.

Meanwhile, conspiracy, conservative, and canada subreddits continue to exist no prob...

Reddit can't die soon enough. It's clear that the site is compromised big time.

As someone who modded a couple subs in the hundreds of thousands plus range on reddit. Most the decent mods left during the exodus. Those who stayed tended to be the powerhungry types who wanted to push a certain narrative.

We may have our opinions about the qualities of Reddit. But the Daily Mail? I feel dirty, just having a link to that dump on my screen.

Voyager has an option to block specific websites/keywords which may be useful to you (depending on your device of choice). Not sure if other front ends have that but I think it's worth looking into.

Not just the US. Can’t access it from NZ either.

I definitely prefer the vibe of lemmy but there’s still communities I visit on Reddit for reviews and discussions about more niche topics.

Reddit down report #420 this year.

Tell me when AWS or something is down. Reddit goes down so often it becomes a nothing burger

I was looking something up and of course Reddit came up but kept telling me “YOU BROKE REDDIT”.

What a shitty way to express an issue that your site is causing for users. Just go ahead and blame the users. That’s great for noobs who don’t know anything and will legitimately think they did something wrong on their end.

why do honest communicstion when yould instead make people feel guilty and coerce them into coming back

Look, I hate reddit as much as the next person, but if you don't realize that page is a joke, you're too dumb for the internet.

Of course it's a joke, but also...

img

Whether intentional or not, it does kinda reflect the spirit of toxic insensitivity. Also, however it started, they left it that way even after this fact was pointed out to them.

Ding ding ding. Its possible to pass off dark patterns as jokes and jokes to become dark patterns when the joke isn't funny anymore

It's the same reason the KKK wears masks - cowards like to hide behind dog whistle language, when they feel disinclined to face any actual consequences of their beliefs and actions.

By that comparison, Reddit's message isn't even so bad (as KKK hate speech!:-), but it does look like it may fall into a similar category at least.

Or not - surely its founder is totally a nice guy who really was simply joking around there with the messaging strategy, no toxicity there at all, amiright!?

Somewhat tangential question: Why do so many sites have links to an external status monitoring site, but when the site is down and you go to check the status on that external status monitoring site, it says everything's fine? What's the point of the status site if it doesn't actually acknowledge that there's any sort of outage nor provide any info on it?

There are a few options off the top off my head

  1. the route/connection between the monitoring and you is OK; between the company and the monitoring is OK; but between you and the company is not OK -- this means that, so far as the monitoring can tell, the site is up.

  2. The status checks run at some interval and you're hitting it before that interval

  3. There's some threshold of errors that needs to happen first so tiny hiccups don't register as full-blown outages.

  4. the monitoring/metrics are poorly-designed

There are probably other cases. I don't know the architecture in this case, so I won't speculate at any others.

Maybe it's not automated and whoever is responsible isn't awake yet.

Yeah, I thought of that a few minutes later and was too lazy to edit. I also thought maybe it's semi-auto and someone needs to verify it manually before allowing the UI to show

You mean redditstatus.com? Might be linked to internal ticket portals.
If you ask because of the domain, it might be to be resilient if theres an issue with the TLD of the company e.g. status.example.com vs status-example.com

At one of the tech companies I worked at, “uptime” was one of the primary metrics that was advertised to customers. There was never a written policy, but management HIGHLY discouraged updating the outage dashboard unless the world was literally on fire, because it made their vanity metric look bad in advertisements.

…yes that’s as dumb as you think it is, but it’s quite common in the tech industry.

Everyone please be nice to the influx of newcomers

If you cannot resist the urge to blurt out your alternative socioeconomic views try your best to at least do it gently

I was wondering why it kept giving me a "you broke reddit" error. Not that Im visiting reddit for funsies, but its where just about every troubleshooting search result takes me, which is frustrating.

I'm all for substantial and lulzy schadenfreude, but this is service notification made into a daily mail article, that's when one starts seeming obsessed with a site one doesn't use anymore

To be fair, the day they actually kill old.reddit we can expect an influx of new users here, so it's still good to keep an eye on it

Apollo sideloaded stopped working so I’m back to Lemmy. Seems like an API issue.

Again, if reddit keeps malfunctioning, eventually it will lose all its functionality and one day shut down for good.

This problem cannot happen to feddiverse? All nodes just queue sending to others?

Ask kbin.social

It can happen because communities and users are monolithic. You lose your home instance, you have to create a new account somewhere else. The community is located in the instance that goes down, you can no longer participate in it and its former members all have to scramble if they want to participate.

That sounds like it is room for improvement in this area.

there is.. Mainly my implementing options for users to export their data (eg. their followers). But also other features like the ActivityPub Move activity for migration.

There's a number of ways it could be improved, but I get the impression the devs and admins were really interested in a poor man's Reddit and are into that sort of monolithic instance control and quite opposed to the transparency that would required to do it any other way (like having the author of upvotes or downvotes visible or the name or an identifier linkable to the mod who performed a moderator action show up in the mod log any longer). At this rate, all I see it is becoming more monolithic and eventually more drama between instances (which there is already plenty of).

impression the devs and admins were really interested in a poor man's Reddit

No, not at all. It's just that sh*t things happens and instances goes down. Remember that kbin (and now Mbin) is development by software engineers doing their job in the free time. And instance owners also. Most don't get paid for all this work, and if they do.. we are talking about 5 dollar per month.

At the same time devs also have families, full time job and other things. While I heard from the Lemmy dev is able to full time work on Lemmy now.

So where is the development interest for less monolithic instance control then? Everything I read indicates a movement towards it, with less transparency that can be federated (like not allowing downvotes and moderation to truly be transparent and there's no interest in making communities that aren't localized to single instances by making its moderation be something that can be something that can be applied and decided at the user or each instance level.

This would also mean inherently allowing user participation in a community regardless of how much an instance doesn't want it (as long as it is not their home instance, which would be the ones in charge of removing spam/bot/CSAM) if a particular selection of a moderation group does not allow it. Communities are monolithic by design, limited to an instance's moderation and then to that instance's administration and then furthermore by its availability.

I'm sure that the availability of time and effort are a factor, it would require dealing with new and different issues, it might require leaving some monolithic aspects, but it fails before it gets at that point, there is no interest nor is it where development wants to head. Communities are monolithic and will essentially remain monolithic. The only thing that is federated is essentially the search features and pseudo-SSO of Lemmy.

What you all mention here are valid issues and concerts. The point is that everything you mentioned is related on how the ActivityPub protocol works, which inherently create this situation of semi-decentralizing in form of instances and federation. If we want to get rid of that, we need a fully different protocol that resolves all your issues in a decentralized way, which isn't always scaling, or leaking the technical advances to do so. Or you could even argue that ActivityPub is currently de facto standard (which also includes Mastodon, etc).

The only way to solve all the issues mentioned is to fully replace ActvityPub by another protocol. Which doesn't relay on instances, and no DNS, and no global identity.. Which are technically very challenging subjects on its own. Fediverse is well.. federated, but not decentralized.

Disclaimer: I'm the developer of Mbin project. And previous contributor of kbin.

And thanks for the work in your branch, it has kept mbin alive. As I understand it, ActivityPub is an open standard for relaying information that is distinct from how the back-end operates, and it operates with very generic concepts like Objects, Activites, and Actors, so I suspect it can be adapted even if I don't know it to the degree that you do. Each user could engage in a community and their contribution would be treated as a multicast hosted on the home instance which the rest of the servers could pick up and update on their end, for example.

Querying for comments and posts in a community could first return local and then the cached for remote content that would update on demand, delaying if necessary, applying the implementation specific decentralization mechanism of choice. Maybe Librecast would be an option, I don't know any-end. Moderation could be applied to the result as a personal preference and in multiple layers by choosing which moderator activities and groups you would accept or ignore, and moderator groups could be treated as entities owned and coordinated by their leaders.

Users behaves badly, user is removed. Instance does not want to deal with certain users from other instances, they block them. They could coordinate general admin decisions between instances, they just would manifest direct control over communities. If they don't like how certain communities behave, they would have options, they just wouldn't have complete control and communities could criticize the application of those options without compromising their entire being. Instances could ban misinformation, but what one instance considers misinformation another might not. Moderators could become trusted instance enforcers and automatically help enforce misinformation filters for the instance groups they cooperate with. It would basically be another layer of abstraction between the community and the host moderators.

Communities could accommodate different schools of thought within the same community and without each other calling the other troll and banishing their participation, one would just have to shift between the moderator groups they want. Instances could step in, but exceptionally, making people's choice of instance matter more. It would be extremely easy to set up a ground.news social network alternative in this context that wouldn't have to devolve into two extremes, but things like downvotes and mod actions would have to be transparent because of how dynamic and customizable the system would have to be.

The problem in the software world isn't usually that there is no choice, it's that there is no will. The obstacles are not insurmountable, there's just no interest in overcoming them I think. I know you can speak for yourself, but I don't think you can speak for the main lemmy (lemmy.ml) devs, mbin is already much more transparent than lemmy is.

Your user is still linked to your home instance. If that goes down, you don't have access to it. You can still browse Lemmy from other servers.

That is sad. So you know if there is any work or solution here? Maybe sync to different instances or just assume it is still you because you have the key to some algorithm and have some data saved in your client?

The solution is making your own instance. You've basically got a copy of your own of everything you follow on the fediverse. If it goes down for a while, messages are indeed queued for a reasonable time. And even if you do miss them, things like comments, up and down votes will act as 'reminders'

Sure, I wound have my own instans but having it alone would be pointless. I think feddiverse would be fine even if the biggest node go down as she many others exist.

You can make your own instance. Not everybody's cup of tea, but in the future it will likely become easier. It will only go down when you let it

Its working as intended for me. Hence, I’m here.

I read "Reddit is down for thousands of years" and got kinda excited.

Reddit is down very based

Reddit is so astroturfed at this point I still use it sometimes but for so many users the content on all is stale as fuck

When it comes back up the remaining 5 actual human users will have had their accounts taken over to be used by more bots.