Thought experiment: could Spez just make reddit speak ActivityPub and turn it into a Lemmy instance?
What if reddit joins the fediverse? What are the implications for that if it were even feasible? We would end up with subreddits as communities on Lemmy such as !askreddit@reddit.com, perhaps.
What are the community's thoughts on this, given the new app by Meta that has attempted to join our free society? Do we just defed, and hope that all the popular instances all do the same?
Discuss 🤓
I want this to happen, and then all of the admins join together to block API requests from the Reddit instance and redirect to pay-per-use API gateway.
The dream.
They should make Reddit pay 20mio per month per third app they killed off. Sweet revenge.
That's basically what Facebook is doing with Mastodon at the moment. And I think the consensus is that nobody wants to federate with Facebook.
Threads was released today and is already larger than Mastodon. The overwhelming size is another reason people are against federation, in top of concerns over data scraping and monetization (the hate speech is already starting up on there too). Facebook has such a poor reputation, I don’t know that Reddit would have as terrible of a reception but it would also be controversial.
He likely couldn't "just" do it. The synchronization overhead for federation is large, and with the amount of data Reddit has, you'd have to put a lot of effort into writing efficient code to handle that. Or pay for a lot of servers doing it.
BTW, it would be interesting to see whether current lemmy codebase could handle it as well…
A reddit instance is conceivable, but the magic of the federation is that no one instance has control. Reddit has control of every subreddit, and they'd lose that control joining the federation. Likewise, there's no financial gain from having an instance.
Instance admins ultimately still have control over communities on their instance no? I don’t think Reddit would lose anything.
I’m not sure what they would gain either. I can’t think of anything that would motivate them to join.
He could, but wouldn't.
But in terms of practicality, you also need to look at the fact that large organisations are full of bureaucracy, I believe there are 200 people working on the Android app for Reddit and it's relatively terrible, whereby the development of Sync was handled by a single person and it was light-years ahead.
Using that as a benchmark, it would take them years before they were able to integrate with us.
If Fediverse is successful and reddit continues its descent then I can see it in 5-10 years, similar to how Digg tried to reimagine itself to stay relevant.
That'd be pretty cool but would take a lot of development time and probably wouldn't work with their stupid features like messaging and NFT scams
A reddit instance is conceivable, but the magic of the federation is that no one instance has control. Reddit has control of every subreddit, and they'd lose that control joining the federation. Likewise, there's no financial gain from having an instance.