I will never trust Google for anything since they killed off Google Plus. Getting rid of "don't be evil" as their corporate motto was a huge giveaway.

I just posted this in response to a frenetic YouTube video that claimed that the Reddit protest "failed":

Get serious. It was NEVER going to stop the IPO. But it has accomplished something even more important: it has decapitated Reddit. A lot of the most passionate and involved users are gone, and more of them have at least tried Fediverse alternatives like Lemmy and kbin. Have you checked those sites out? They're FLOODED with Reddit refugees, and the communities there are booming! They're active and vibrant, with great discussions and content.

What's more, they have hope. The members there aren't subject to some psychotic money-grubbing corporation; if any one server goes authoritarian, there's nothing stopping the users there from just moving to another. They'll have the same access and functionality. And frankly, the odds of a Fediverse server going corporate and having an IPO are infinitesimal. It simply wouldn't be worth it, particularly since there's no way they could stop other instances from defederating with them.

So the outcome of the blackout has been twofold: First, Reddit has lost some of it's best. The quality of content there is diminished, and will continue to diminish as poor quality drives users away. And second, the Fediverse alternatives have been given a huge boost. Almost all users of Reddit are now aware of the ugly truths that underlie that service, and that there are alternatives out there.

That's not failure. That's the seeds of success.

And by the way, I think that's one thing we can all do to help bring down Reddit: mention the great alternatives out there as much as possible to spread the word. The more Redditors who learn that they don't have to be a product to be sold by the pound for the stockholder class, the quicker Reddit will fall!

So Reddit management is afraid. Good.

I find it strangely hard to care about the fate of a handful of multimillionaire tourists when hundreds of refugees died last week due to the indifference of the Greek authorities - and the media barely noticed.

How ironic! I had just subscribed to several communities on those instances this evening. Go figure. I guess I should reproduce my community subscriptions over on kbin. But wait, does this mean I can't even SEE that I subscribed to those communities here?

I don't know about deletions, but I requested my data for takeout more than two weeks ago and I still haven't received it.

GOOD!

Those sociopaths have weighed down this sorry planet for far too long.

It was well before I turned one; I was still in a crib. It was dark, nighttime, and incredibly hot. Some sort of animal with glowing eyes stared at me from the floor.

I thought it was a dream, but decades later my parents confirmed that when I was a baby the thermostat had broken and we had a night where the temperature was 100°. As for the animal with glowing eyes, that was our cat.

I think there's a nice little horror story in that: "My husband has been dead for six months but his AI copy won't stop emailing me" or something like that.

I agree completely! And thanks for clearing up the disassociative identity disorder question, because I actually was wondering for a second. 😆

But if #1 is too hard, the ability to download all of your data from a login and possibly upload it to another account would be a good stopgap.

I'm hoping that kbin won't pull the trigger. And that eventually this will be worked out. And also that eventually there will be some way to cross-connect accounts across the Fediverse, so I can (for example) share my community subscriptions across all my accounts...or whichever accounts I want, anyway.

My 10" cast iron Lodge skillet. It's great! And don't believe all the people who claim that you have to devote most of your life to taking care of your cast iron. They're cast iron for God's sake! Pioneers took them all the way across America in their Conestoga wagons. Just don't leave them wet or stick them in a dishwashing machine, and you're fine!

That is absolutely brilliant. I would love something like that. Why doesn't it exist?

YES! It's the most imposing name imaginable. And not at all intuitive.

Argh. I'll have to hope that I can rediscover them, then. That's irritating!

Yes, Lemmy was flaking out when I posted this. My comment was directed toward what should happen to Reddit on a different thread.

• Anticonsumerism
• Asexuality
• Dating
• Google Services
• Suggest Me A Book

I'm trying to imagine a worse name. Since God has a sense of irony, I imagine it will end up being a doozy!

It's probably a mix of both. Er, what exactly happened to those subs?

I wouldn't sweat it, though. Reddit will never recover from the events of the last two days. They'll be bleeding users from now on.

I don't care as long as they don't take away NotePad. NotePad has useful features I'd hate to lose - such as stripping out all formatting, and being able to search/replace wildcard characters as themselves, rather than as wildcards.

Imgur is heading for an IPO too. And they're going to be purging all NSFW content. In other words, they're busy committing suicide.

Free speech and corporate ownership are completely incompatible.

I went over to kbin (I already had an account there) and replicated my subscription list as best I could. Splitting my time between here and there. I wish I didn't have to have two separate accounts, though! I didn't want to be fragmented.

I wonder if the Internet Archive has preserved much of Reddit's old posts and comments? No one seems to have mentioned it.

So what? We'll create one!

Years ago the owners of GoodReads announced that Amazon had taken away their access to the Amazon book database. It was an existential threat, they said, and asked the GoodReads community to volunteer to create a new book database to replace Amazon's. Hundreds or thousands of us worked for free, donating thousands or tens of thousands of hours to the project.

And then GoodReads announced that they'd sold out to Amazon. Apparently they'd been in negotiations with those bastards the whole time they were lying to us about losing access to the database. Maybe proving that they could sucker their loyal users into donating free labor helped raise the selling price of GoodReads a little.

As for the database we created, I guess it's Amazon's now. Of course, if we create a movie database of our own, NOBODY will be able to buy it! And we can make it available for free use, if we want.

Power is addictive. At least for some people.

After so many experiences with having online platforms sold out from under me by venture capitalist scum, I'm not inclined to trust anything owned by a corporation or single person. I'm on storygraph, but I'm not going to put effort into it. I think BookWyrm has more of a future. Even if the current owner of StoryGraph has good intentions, you never know what could happen. It seems as if things always go bad.

Is that related to Paper.wf? The wf apparently stands for "write freely".

He's finally part of the "in" crowd. Notice that both Republicans and Democrats are pretty much eager to avoid looking at his crimes; instead both parties are just fundraising off of him.

I want to abolish work, not reform it. Reforms always end up getting rolled back by the plutocrats.

Same here. Example: I have a question I want to post on AskLemmy. I started to post it from Beehaw, and realized that I'd be cutting off responses from a huge swath of the Fediverse if I did. So I'll be posting it from kbin, instead.

I did exactly that. And ever since then, I've been backing up my full uncompressed photographs onto several duplicate hard drives and flash drives. Plus my videos, of course. I really should set up a server so I could do all that automatically, but I don't really know how and don't have the energy to figure it out.

Jerboa is crashing more and more frequently. I'm getting maybe five minutes between crashes now.

Interesting! But do other instances have more features? Paper.wf seems incredibly feature-light. You can't browse other blogs, you can't follow them, you can't comment on entries or receive comments...I mean, it's unbelievably bare bones. Beautiful, but isolated-feeling. I'm typing into a void!

Let it all burn down. Leave nothing for the IPO.

Hi! I'm not just a Reddit refugee, but an everything refugee. Or at least, that's how it feels. I've been online since the mid-80s, and I've seen platform after platform be acquired and burnt down under me. I'm pretty much used to it by this point.

That doesn't mean I like it.

I'm an old-time geek. Huge bibliophile, particularly fond of old science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, children's books, YA, classics, and humor. Oh, add graphic novels and manga to the list. I'm also a long time tabletop RPG player and GM. My system of choice is the Avalon Hill edition of RuneQuest 3; my RQ site might be the oldest one still existing. Of course I play other systems as well. I'm into deep role-playing, and would definitely like to find people who are interested in that sort of thing!

My primary activity over on Reddit was recommending books. I have a resource of nearly a thousand book recommendations that I have created over the years. Hoping to be able to make recommendations on Lemmy, too.

What else? I'm a pretty good public speaker, and was an invited program participant (i. e. panelist) at a regional New England science fiction convention for over 25 years. I'm an atheist, but I advocate tolerance and understanding between atheists and theists (and yes, I've done panels on that topic too; they were great).

I was a redhead when I had hair, with a redheaded son. I'm the single divorced father of a newly-adult son. I'm currently unattached. Oh, and I'm apparently demisexual.

I live in Massachusetts, USA. I like cats, cooking, walking, and well-written TV and movies. I've been refining my grilling techniques for about 35 years now, on a lifelong quest to make the perfect burger.

But those are some of the highest contributors, I'd bet. That 75,000 might well represent a hole in the Reddit's hull that will end up sinking the ship.

They're certainly enough that a substantial percentage of the total Reddit user population - at least the involved ones - are now aware that there is an alternative to Reddit. That's huge. As Reddit continues to go downhill - and it has to, that IPO is coming - and Reddit management continues to screw users and mods, more and more people will jump ship.

June 30th, the 3Pocalypse, will trigger the next major wave. Each reduction or elimination of NSFW content will trigger another. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if Reddit doesn't make more serious unforced errors along the way.

And spez et alia aren't quite as stupid as many believe. They don't care about 75,000, sure. But they can read the tea leaves as well as anyone else. Their major concern has to be that the emigration from Reddit to Lemmy could impact the value of the IPO. It's a clear danger, albeit only a potential one at this point.

Oh, they're watching all right.

You have to pay a few bucks? How many and how often?

Personally I've been surprised at how little I miss Reddit! Which goes to show just how much value it had lost, I think. I can't speak for anyone else, but participating on Reddit felt very enervating in the last few years. Will this be downvoted? Will this get me banned? Why would ANYONE downvote that comment? etc. It wasn't a safe place to be, but that's not the primary problem; a little uncertainty can lend spice to a situation. Rather, it was like being in a big room with a fairly large number of bullies, any of whom could also turn out to have untrammeled authority and the desire to abuse it.

I always felt that Reddit should have been run democratically. Perhaps we'll start seeing Lemmy instances that are run that way!