Here (kbin), Lemmy, Tildes… I hear Mastodon had a user spike. Is there something obvious I’m missing?
I ask because I haven’t felt the same mass of users that Reddit had. Obviously users have spread out, servers have been hammered, UIs have a learning curve and so on… But there might be other alternatives I haven’t looked at that are worth that look.
After reddit my needs from a social book marking website are simple:
The internet needs to have something like reddit as core infrastructure. A digital public square. This requirement is incompatible with profit motive. This is why time and time again social media sites fail.
This exactly. Before this whole thing, I had no idea that social media could be open source. Now that I do, it’s what I need.
Ironically, reddit was open source. Here’s the python source code repo for what the site was between 2005-2017. They have it preserved in an archive, and reddit the company still does contribute a lot of open source code and to open source projects, but I don’t think the react rewrite of the site is included in that list.
If reddit simply wanted to sustain its userbase, it’d be in a much better place.
That’s fundamentally the problem with the internet (and corporate culture as a whole, really). When a site takes off, the expectation isn’t to sustain the status quo, it’s to continue that growth. It inevitably reaches a point where maintaining exponential growth becomes more and more difficult, but even more profit still needs to be made. They find ways to squeeze every last goddamn drop out of it, almost always to the detriment of the users, the user’s experience, and everyone’s privacy.
The never-ending growth model is fundamentally the problem here, and that’s why I completely agree with you. Like you said, “This requirement is incompatible with profit motive.”
we really need to be done with capitalism, already. it got us here but now it’s obsolete.
Growth for the sake of growing is the model of cancer.
I second your list and I’d add my personal preference: the public square shouldn’t be ginormous.
Reddit feels like trying to have a conversation at the she time with all the people that could fit in St. Peter’s Square.
After these few days on Kbin I realised I’d rather be in a small town’s square where maybe I recognise some people and my voice isn’t drowned.
A st Peter’s square of everyone trying to be the funniest person in the room. It was impossible trying to have any level of conversation because everyone just jumped in with a dumb joke constantly
As far as funding goes, Diaspora (Fedi facebook, I think) runs off of an ?$8? a year model.
Not unreasonable pricing. The estimate I saw for reddit is about 30 cents a year per user is their current take. Would I have paid $5 a year for ad free access? You bet your ass I would, but it wouldn’t be nearly greedy enough for Reddit.
Hell, I paid $5 to ernest already for having me here for less than a week. Good will isn’t that hard to gain sometimes and reddit lost alllll of it.
Once I get my bearings and decide where I’m going to be hosted (bouncing between beehaw, here and Lemmy) I’ll be contributing regularly. I’m happy to pay when I know It’s going for something like this, not to make a creeper into a billionaire.