What if Reddit joined the Fediverse?
What if Reddit joined the Fediverse?
The recent Threads controversy brought this question to my mind.
It is certain that such a thing will not happen, but if it was in theory; what would your reactions be? Also are your views on this similar to your views on Threads?
Fuck Reddit, Spez is an asshole
I'm wondering who's more HATED by their users /fans, Spez or Bettman? (NHL (Hockey) Commissioner)
It wouldn't make sense from a business standpoint. Reddit's content would be accessible through free and open instances which wouldn't bring traffic through Reddit and their ads. The thing that brought the end of the API and third party Reddit clients in the first place.
Edit: I completely missed the point of the question.
In other words: joining the Fediverse would not be the greedy thing to do, which is why we can be absolutely sure that spez would not consider it.
Bad bad bad bad bad bad.
I firmly believe that no instance should harbor a large portion of activity on the fediverse, as it makes it difficult for other instances to defederate from them (as users there would lose a massive portion of the content that they see) and easy for them to take users from other instances by just ceasing to federate (as users on other instances would have to go to the large instance to keep the level of activity their used to). And that's in regards to microblogs like on Mastodon.
With communities, it'd be so much worse.
If Reddit federates, and Lemmy/Kbin instances don't defederate en masse, almost every active community will be on reddit.com. No reason to post on minecraft@lemmy.world with its 5 posts a week when Minecraft@reddit.com has millions of subscribers and thousands upon thousands of active users. Nearly all activity will go to subreddits, the exceptions being from people who have blocked Reddit or on communities pertaining to non-Reddit platforms/instances (e.g., kbinMeta@kbin.social). And if Reddit defederates after that, the threadiverse will be a ghost town. People are already (and justifiably) concerned that too many people and big communities are on lemmy.world. Just imagine Reddit coming in with all of its users.
If Reddit federates, it's just gonna straight up be embrace and extinguish — no extend required.
I would love it. I hate Reddit, I hate the UI, the apps, the ads, etc. Being able to access some of the niche communities that don't have a presence on Lemmy, on my own terms and without even having a Reddit account? Absolutely.
Spez is unlikely to ever do anything unless the Musk has already said that he wanted to do it.
At which point you might start to worry that both X and Reddit may join us at some point? But consider this: if Spez ever did tell people that he wanted to do that, it would take their programmers 20 years to write the code to make it happen, and by then we'll all have moved on to direct thought sharing over the Web10.0 anyway. :-P Whereas if he simply bought the code off of somebody else who already made a fully-functional copy, then like Alien Blue - the forerunner to Reddit's official app - it would still self-destruct in his hands, converting itself into a pile of dung. At which point we simply defederate from it, no worries.
Here we are free.
Nah, they'll use the Embrace-Extend-Extinguish method to ruin a good thing.
I just started browsing here in stead of Reddit because the last ui change just throws recommended trash at me and it's cluttered. I'm still trying to figure out what this is but it seems like decentralized servers that all link to each other anyway?
Hey welcome! I can recommend to
- checking this post: https://sh.itjust.works/post/24928
- or this image: https://i.imgur.com/b2QuYAR.png
for orientation. Things shouldn't have changed much for you. I just recommend you to choose a nice mobile app and alternative web UI (listed on your instance sidebar).
You already said that it won't happen but from my understanding, it isn't possible because the fediverse has a certain protocol and reddit most certainly works differently. Am I right? I don't want to sound snobbish, I got that's it's a thought experiment. I just wondered if I'm correct.
On your question: I think most servers wouldn't federate but it won't be as bad as with Threads. I myself wouldn't be too sure. Maybe I would create a second account on a server that's federated with reddit but I don't want my feed to be fluted by it.
Reddit does work differently and they would have to implement the ActivityPub protocol in order to federate, which would be a lot of effort for them.
The bigger thing is, ActivityPub is an API protocol. So for example, by knowing your username and instance I could call a particular API endpoint on your instance and get, just as one example, all your "outbox" messages - everything you have posted, the tags, actors you have sent it to (people or communities), etc. The reason for the large recent Reddit exodus is that they shut down their API because they do not want people to be able to easily pull all their data. So they would absolutely never implement ActivityPub, in my opinion. They want to remain walled off.
Federation protocols can be implemented on top of other systems too. For example you can probably fork lemmy to make it also federate with the matrix protocol to some extent, or the other way around.
Probably yes. Since ActivityPub is a content transfer protocol just like any other APIs.
Permanently Deleted
I mean, it's not exactly the same thing, but there's tons of bots that repost Reddit posts over here. That's all the alien.top instance is. So in a limited way, it's already happening.
People's reactions would be even more against it than to Threads for sure. It would also be more dangerous because while Meta has less incentive to destroy the Fediverse (it's but a blip in their user base), Reddit is not only much smaller but doesn't have other apps to pull users from. Reddit is just reddit. Reddit would love to eat up the Fediverse if they could.
I think it would be similar to threads. Some instances would federate others wouldn't. The fideverse wouldn't add a lot of value to Reddit but reddit could add a lot of value to the fideverse.
cant go one year without stalker ._.
