First all the bs with Twitter and Elon, then Reddit having an exodus to Lemmy (not complaining lol), then Twitch. Are we like, in an alternate self healing dimension or something?
This Lemmy migration does feel like waaaaay more positive of a result than I ever expected from reddit getting worse.
I’ve always appreciated the idea of the fediverse, but mastodon and the twitter-style of social media has never appealed to me, and Lemmy used to be so tiny and niche, so I didn’t invest much time in it until now. But this sure is nice, comparatively. I’m probably on here too much though!
Same. Never cared about Twitter, but I like new internet stuff, so I got on Mastodon. Never used it and forgot about it for years. Came back to it with all the Elon stuff and realized the instance was dead, so I created a new account on another instance to never use. The point is, like you said, Lemmy is something I will actually use if the community continues to grow and sticks around.
Mastodon has a place, just isn’t for some people. I found the same problem you had with it. Just like how conversations work better in a Reddit-like style of communicating.
Agree with you on this! The migration was super smooth, and even tho, its still quiet small comparative to reddit… It seems to be growing quickly, and seems pretty polished for something in such infancy
I think we do have a sufficient number of users now to keep going irrespective of how reddit fares. Communities are beginning to form and even if there is no futher mass exodus from reddit, I think Lemmy will be fine and will see organic growth over time.
I’ve already noticed I’m spending more time of Lemmy than reddit since the past few days.
It’s easier to spend time on Lemmy for me because the comments are actually worth reading. Seems like the type of person who’s drawn here are actually interested in holding a conversation vs. reddit where it’s about saying something witty or whatever to get them upvotes
They saw Lemmy becoming successful, corporate mistook Lemmy with Lemmings, and decided to go out Lemmings style.
…jokes aside, Cory Doctorow has a great text about that, called “Tiktok’s enshittification”. It’s a four-steps process:
- The platform is good for its users.
- The platform abuses the users, to be good for its business customers.
- The platform abuses the business customers, to claw back all value for itself.
- The platform dies.
In my opinion it’s also the result of management being disconnected from the platform that it manages, and not knowing fully the implications of their own decisions.
Was going link this.
Really great article. I’ve been hearing about it for a while, but finally managed to read through it fully. Very well thought out and a brilliant write-up IMO.
You beat me to it, the man is an oracle.
Some people have come up with the word “enshittification” to describe the basic cycle of modern web services.
The cycle consists of three parts:
- You make the service that attracts new users by providing what they want. Often you do that at a loss, because your goal is to gain a big enough userbase for steps 2 and 3.
- Once there’s enough users, you shift to attracting commercial interests instead – vendors if you’re running a store, advertisers or celebrities or other “big clients” if you’re a social network, etc.
- Once both users and commercial interests are hooked, you can start tightening all the rules and switching completely to profiting yourself and your shareholders.
I am under the impression that the term was popularized, if not invented, by Cory Doctorow. See his many writings on his ad & tracker-free website; https://pluralistic.net/tag/enshittification/
Wiktionary gives him the invention credit (although its source does seem to be KnowYourMeme).
The bestest of sources.
I disagree, we all know that any article that cites the onion is 100% infallibly correct 100% of the time
That is a spectacular definition though! Spot on!
“entshittification” is such a terrible word, can’t believe that a professional writer came up with it
Doctorow’s Enshittification describes it pretty much dead-on. It’s basically the cancerous form of late-stage capitalism that we’re living under now.
All these websites have almost always been net cash flow negative. They bleed venture capital to provide a service below cost in order to build a user base.
The problem now is interest rates have spiked. Rates have been basically zilch for much of the internet’s history over the past 20+ years, so sites could actually operate for quite some time on super cheap debt that they almost never had to repay. And venture capital firms would just keep pouring money into the “next best thing”.
Now that debt is rapidly becoming much more expensive to maintain, and those VC investors want their chunk of the pie back in their pockets. And they are going to extract it from every single one of these centralized services by whatever force is necessary. It’s only just getting started, you watch.
Note that they are cashflow negative because of expensive advertising features.
Twitter is pretty cheap to run for base functionality and if you open up dev console and see all of the resources Twitter is requesting its like 90% ad stuff and suggestions.
That’s just bandwidth, though. What about database load? A big part of Lemmy’s growing pains come from slow database queries. It doesn’t take much bandwidth to send you the content, but the server has to do a lot of work to figure out which content to send you.
Every request is tied to some functionality. Databases and storage is laughably cheap these days.
The complex queries and all the overhead features is where the real expense is. Crafting a personal, ad-optimized timelines is what’s costing Twitter the most money. The public/subscribed feeds of mastodon are incredibly efficient even on something super slow like ruby on rails.
Lemmy is having the same problem and doesn’t have ads.
Does it though? This instance has thousands of users and interactions already and is running on just few dollars a month.
It’s running on a few hundred dollars a month, if I recall correctly, and it has only about 450 users per day. (The sidebar statistics don’t include a figure for peak concurrent users, unfortunately, and that’s what we really need to know.)
Ah didnt see that increase though decentralized systems are inheritly very inefficient unfortunately
But advertising is also where 90% of their revenue comes from- so really, given the service is “free”, what is the product?
Maga hats
You can’t lose money forever, not as a business. What’s great about the Fediverse is that it makes social media something that can be done as a hobbyist project. Money is nice, but the hobbyist isn’t necessarily out to make money.
The timeline split after harambe. This is known
The line has to go up.
The issue is that big companies have shareholders, and those shareholders don’t demand that the company stay solvent, but that they achieve year-over-year growth. Even minimal growth like 2-3% over LY is considered a failure to most shareholder groups, depending on the size of the company. So eventually they have to squeeze every last drop out of the userbase/product to keep the line going up, so shareholders don’t sell and bail.
Now, with Twitter there’s a whole litany of poitical tin-foil hat theories I can shout out, but this isn’t the place for it.
Reddit, Facebook, and Twitch: it’s money.
Reddit is getting as much money as it can shored up with Venture Capital before it brings out it’s Initial Public Offering (basically going public for people to buy stock in). High IPO, more perceived value, more space for advertisers, people are going to buy in. EDIT: I believe this is why they’re making their API pricing so high (hence the whole current Reddit situation right now) so that they can get more ads viewed.
Facebook: I don’t even know why people use FB, but im going to guess it’s just ads.
Twitch: Again, Ad revenue. Slam as many first-party ads as you can so you get the money from advertisers. Keep the space clean and homogenized so Pepsi doesn’t feel bad about putting ads in a video before a hot-tub streamer. (not that they’re a bad thing, just using an example)
Everything comes down to the line. And it has to keep going up.
Just to add my thoughts to your Facebook point:
I don’t use Facebook much but I do have an account for the sake of keeping connected to distant family I’d otherwise never speak to again. The rare occasion I’m directly contacted and open the app to see what’s up, legitimately every other post, sometimes several in a row, is some kind of ad or sponsernd Post. Legitimately my entire timeline is one massive ad reel, I cannot fathom how people keep using the platform. Literally anything else would be better
Maybe its a feature, not a flaw.
Maybe Facebook is not only for connecting with family and friends, but also for shopping (ads)
Lol, never seen someone justify ads as such, gave me a chuckle
It’s pretty bad, the content you want to see the least is what’s always at the top of your feed. It’s like they are intentionally trying to piss you off.
Keep the space clean and homogenized so Pepsi doesn’t feel bad about putting ads in a video before a hot-tub streamer. (not that they’re a bad thing, just using an example)>
Oh it totally is a bad thing. They show women in an oversexualized lewd context to a target audience that consists to signifact extent of children. Don’t misunderstand this as moralism. I’m not coming from a conservative perspective that wants women to be all buttoned up or something. I’m just being critical of a company normalizing the objectification of women (or anyone) to children for the purpose of making money.
I may have worded it wrong (mainly because morning coffee takes forever to hit me). I meant to say that I don’t think those hot-tub streamers are bad because of what they do, I just don’t think they belong on Twitch.
Yep, it’s this. Despite how it seemed in the 2010s investor capital is not free money. Investors want it paid back many multiple times over and they’ll risk destroying the underlying product if necessary.
Facebook: Mainly because of Facebook groups. They’re pretty whacky, have a lot of fun normie non-degenerate drama, and a well moderated facebook group is more wholesome than any reddit sub in my experience.
It is relaxing to not have the hivemind like reddit or having users constantly one-up each other like twitter. Also wayyy less bot accounts in Facebook groups.
Although it is declining because of FB’s shitty censors and bans, the group scenes are very much alive and fun.
Yep, i have Facebook for groups, events, and also local services.
Oh yeah I forgot about the Local Events and Services part. and Marketplace.
I don’t think there is any replacement for FB in local event organisation. And with how crap google is rn, it is much easier to search facebook marketplace for local services and have a better outcome.
Mobilizon is an event organization site that is part of the Fediverse but the benefit of the corporate sites is widescale adoption.
TIL
That looks like a nice piece of tech, but you’re right about the adoption part. Getting a minimally significant number of people to sign up for this in my country in gonna be a herculean effort
I hate how much of the entire internet experience is focused on ads, ads, ads. I go out of my way to block trackers so the ads often aren’t that relevant and really transparent. Buy, consume, give us your data, repeat. But what would the alternative look like?
Surely wouldn’t it be easier for them to just inject ads into the API and keep it cheap?
IF that’s something they can do? I don’t know. I don’t know a thing about backend work on third-party programs.
There’s a part of the that thinks Reddit is the same way and just went “Hell with it, use us or nothing at all” and nukes the whole API except for the big-rollers.
I wouldn’t even know who would pay such a high price for that anyway, outside of advertisers and algorithm scrapers.
It is possible for them to return sponsored posts via the API.
Apps will request something like “Give me the first 100 posts from the subreddit /r/aww, using the sorting Hot”. And then Reddit can return 95 actual posts with sponsored posts sprinkled in between every so often.
Like everything that gets advertisements, ad-blockers will be built. While technically possible, look at the quality of SponsorBlock for YouTube. Serving ads in the API will clutter up feeds, data gathered by automatic programs or moderation tools, and it’s impossible to tell (on the Reddit server side) if they have actually been viewed.
We’ve reached the end of the VC-funded golden age where they are all now demanding a return on their investment, hence why the screws are now all getting tightened.
I have a sinking feeling that these moves are not about money, but more about power and manipulation. If you squeeze these user bases such that the savviest users are forced out, those more likely to ask “Why?” about damn near anything, you will own access to a group of people that can be influenced to think/do/buy whatever the top management and/or majority shareholders want. If you lose a few million users, what does it matter if they were dissidents to your goals?
I don’t think all that many redditors are moving to Lemmy. Judging by the stats on join-lemmy, there are only several thousand monthly Lemmy users, which is nothing compared to reddit which had tens of millions daily users
When I joined lemmy.ml and beehaw.org, the stats on join-lemmy.org were just over 100/month.
Now it’s at 1K/month for beehaw and 1.6K/month for lemmy.ml
There’s also a HUGE list now, where as when I joined last week there were maybe 8?
Small numbers, ya, but Reddit still hasn’t done anything. I am sure July 1st will bring a huge wave of people who are still sticking with Reddit since apps still work.
I feel like reddit power users are the only ones who might switch, normal people simply won’t care. However, power users are already well aware of the coming changes, and have likely already looked for alternates by this point.
Ive seen so many reddit posts on where people are like “what’s wrong with the official reddit app, it’s all I’ve ever used”… Lemmy is much better than the official reddit experience - the issue is most niche communities that exist on Reddit have ~1-5 subscribers here, makes it kind of a hard sell.
Personally i’d way rather be in a small community filled with frequent commenters and posters than a big one where all you see is reposts and ads, however.
Exactly this. I moved from Digg to Reddit ~14 years ago and mostly participate in the smaller/ niche communities on Reddit. I’m switching over to Lemmy and it reminds me of what Reddit used to be like.
I mean, power users make most interesting content, so i can easily imagine regular users just naturally getting, like, bored.
I came here from Reddit in preparation for it getting whack… ready to make a jump to something closer to how old school reddit was. I think we’ll see a lot more people who are like minded coming over too.
@Dandylion @JshKlsn @technology I’m interested in a Fediverse Reddit alternative. I’m familiar with Lemmy as a software project, but not as a community. Beehaw is totally new to me.
What are these projects aiming for community-wise? What is needed to help them grow?
And critically: Who is paying hosting costs and handling DMCA issues?
I cannot answer most of your questions, as I don’t know.
And critically: Who is paying hosting costs and handling DMCA issues?
The hosting costs are paid by the instance host. As of now, servers are community funded. This doesn’t seem like a viable long term solution, as people hate paying, but hate ads. Unfortunately one of them has to be done.
DMCA is also unknown to me. I guess it would be the admins of the instance the copyrighted content is hosted on? however, given the fact there’s nothing stopping an instance from being hosted in a different country, similar to pirate websites, I don’t know if there’s anything stopping or enforcing that stuff? I mean, from a legal standpoint. Sure, admins might not want their instance being full of piracy, but that would be more of a morality thing.
One cool thing about decentralization is the higher costs incurred to copyright trolls. No longer can they comb through a single corp platform raising the alarm on violations, they’ll have to spend some effort searching wider, sometimes dealing with uncooperative admins, hydra effect within the same fed network, etc. I can see forces pulling in both directions, not sure where it’ll land.
Imho hosting costs, community moderation, federation politics are the larger elephants in the room. Copyright has always been just a suggestion, the huge platforms are the exception.
A DMCA method, Privacy Policy and even a TOS is what is needed to make me feel more comfortable here. Right now, you have no idea what the plan is for your data (and its rentention), data collection, etc. I might dig into the lemmy code and see if I can sus it out myself if I have time.
Counting methods are probably different, Lemmy stats only count users that posted at least once in the interval. I assume Reddit counts anyone who opens the site.
The Twitter exodus (which is still limited) was because all of the problems at Twitter were sudden. Huge staff cuts meant lower quality, way more bots, and of course, the owner’s mercurial impulses.
Reddit is a bit different. It’s more of a boiled frog situation. A little tweak here, a little change there, all definitely for the worse (and Reddit is going down hill) but so far nothing seismic. Even the number of users affected by the third party apps thing is pretty small because most users just looking at memes and sharing news just use the native app (my wife does).
I’m not sure whether that really results in an exodus.
Look at Amazon: it just gets worse and worse, but have people stopped buying from it en masse? Nope. It’s getting worse, but ever so slowly.
To be clear, I like it better here, but I do not want an exodus of any type. I want slow migration to help the platform grow more organically and for people to see a polished experience.
People won’t come back if they show up once, interact with this not-pretty-but-functional site and don’t like it. So I’d rather wait for the influx of users to be at a later time tbh.
The trick is to have enough of an interest from enthusiasts now to “prime the pump” so when the general population comes over there is enough to keep them here.
It sort of reminds me of the Digg exodus. Reddit was a much smaller site than Digg yet there were many instances of Digg users reposting things from Reddit since the community had quality content despite it’s small size. The Digg redesign only accelerated the migration.
I agree. A few more people will learn about Lemmy and come over, but to call it an exodus is probably nowhere near accurate. I just don’t think most people care enough. Yes Reddit will suffer. I’m just not convinced Lemmy will benefit that much.
That said, I think we will benefit in the sense that there will now be enough people to sustain some nice communities.
Disclaimer: I’m new here, so obviously talking somewhat out of my lower bode parts here.
Reddit may not even suffer if it primarily loses users that browse with third party apps or on desktop with adblock. That would be a net benefit for reddit based on average revenue per user.
That’s fair to point out, but it implies the only utility users provide to the site is ad impressions. I see a couple of reasons this is not the case.
Mods make up a tiny portion of users but are disproportionately 3rd party app users and rely on 3rd party tools. But if any meaningful portion of the mod community leaves? The remainder were going to have a much bigger job without the tools. To attempt the bigger job with a smaller workforce is a double-whammy. Their only option will be to focus on their favorite subs and elevate more members to mods. The inevitable result will be experienced mods being far outnumbered by new mods, all of whom will have to stick to tedious tasks for subs to not be overrun by spam and hate speech. It’s hard not to predict the same result as what’s happened to Twitter’s content.
Now consider nsfw content, which has always made up a huge chunk of reddit’s traffic. Moderation is even more difficult there to begin with and could easily melt down for the same reasons, even setting aside reddit’s growing distaste for it. Reddit is largely young and male and while many users may have no interest in it, the combination of nsfw imgur links going dead, moderation challenges, and the likelihood of reddit cracking down on nsfw is a combination that may cause reddit to be less attractive for many of the young, male userbase to visit.
I think your point still has merit - reddit won’t miss many of the users seeking alternatives. I would say reddit’s casual “I didn’t even know there were 3rd party apps / old.reddit.com” users are also likely to be turned off by the ultimate results of their changes.
Oh, that’s a point. Do third party apps not show those sponsored posts that look like a discussion, but are actually an ad?
I use Infinity (for Reddit), and I don’t see any sponsored posts
I can’t comment on if they do or not as I exclusively use(d) Syncpro, but there are still loads of “real” posts that are blatant marketing attempts that get posted.
I will confirm that I don’t see sponsored content using a third party app and RES.
RIF is Fun does not show sponsored posts.
I think the Lemmy userbase stands to gain much, while Reddit Inc probably won’t feel a gut stabbing loss.
I commented similarly elsewhere, but the “power user” content creator types on Reddit actively avoid r/all for being a dumpster fire. This disconnects them from the fact that there is an absolutely massive userbase on Reddit who scroll the frontpage and keep coming back to that low quality content.
When power users threaten with “if we leave who will create content?” they are not understanding that their content isn’t relevant. R/all is full of low quality reposts, and political ragebait. My own original content probably cracked about 4K upvotes at highest. It was never going to go to the frontpage. When I deleted it, frontpage users never noticed.
That kind of content is more fit for smaller spaces that have not become the self perpetuating juggernaut that the Reddit front page is.
Lemmy and other sites will gain the quality from exiting power users, and Reddit Inc won’t feel it in the way they care about.
I guess the question is: Do you care more about having a good online experience and not thinking about Reddit, or about burning Reddit to the ground? Because the later I don’t think happens from an exodus.
Oh, I’m not saying it’s not good for us (or maybe I did. Badly worded in that case). I just don’t think Reddit cares or will notice to be honest.
I think we are agreeing in high view concept, just expressing it differently.
Well right now lemmy is beefing itself up ready for a predict wave a people moving from reddit to lemmy due to the blackout. Now how many of those people stay and how many return to reddit is a different question. Few of us are moving right now, since you’d have to be involved in reddit communities more. But we will see how many people move on the 12th etc
Everybody just wants money now. Some of that is reasonable, these companies tend to work if not with a loss, then with quite unpredictable margins.
Now that tech investors have found a new bubble - AI - they are no longer willing to sponsor old-fashion internet stuff and wait if it ever turns a profit.
Especially since many got used to becoming all that richer during the pandemic, and are looking to keep those numbers rising.
But there’s also some sudden hatred of porn, and I don’t know where that is coming from. Tumblr, Imgur have limited it completely, OF wanted to, Reddit probably will, coedcherry shut down. The owner of coedcherry said it was really a sudden 180° turn of the banks to no longer wanting to do anything with porn, and nobody knows why.
It’s especially bizzare considering how these platforms keep assuring us that we’ll still be able to post and see blown off heads and all kinds of other nasty stuff, it’s just the titties that are being banned! Eh?
The porn thing comes from sex trafficking. No one wants to be caught accidentally financing it (as no one would ever want to because it’s Fucking horrible).
Well shit. Still weird tho that banks are willing to leave so much money on the table. Not like there’s any conscience in those institutions.
They really just care about their image
Yup, and want to avoid making the government big mad.
What’s the difference between banks and governments tho?
The CEO
I’m sure the rise of Evangelism in the US doesn’t help
I believe the porn thing is one specific religiously motivated American group pressuring banks and paying processors
It does feel like it.
It’s also a good excuse to introduce ever more surveillance. “To protect the children.”
this article might interest you: Puritanism took over online fandom — and then came for the rest of the internet
Interesting. There is some merit to it, now that I think about it, there has been some discourse regarding raunchy content in fiction.
But I also find it hard to believe that there can be any strong relation between that and the larger push against anything AC in laws, regulations and from places like banks.
Unless it’s something ironic - such as the people with enough influence being those who enjoy the content and being insulted by the pushback, so they decide to just destroy the fun for everybody. Considering how often we learn about the most adamant anti-XY regulators engaging in said XY, that actually make some sense. Just a throught though.
Regardless, it’s weird. And it’s also extremely counter productive. Vilifying stuff like that only cases people who enjoy such content to dig themselves deeper underground. Which is a common line when it comes to all kinds of bans and cancelations.
Dont use banks and cards. Porn and monero were meant to be.
Facebook dies due to privacy concerns and misinformation. Twitter under threat because Elon. Imgur just deleted their NSFW content. Reddit with its API pricing. Twitch executives also getting greedy. Youtube has been going down for years.
It feels like we’re seeing the natural life-cycle of social media companies in real time.
TikTok might be the next
I very much like the community aspect of TikTok; is there anyone working on a Fediverse alternative to it? Or perhaps adding its features to PeerTube?
TikTok is literally owned by China.
One can only hope.
Discord’s been going very downhill for years, and recently made a wider known awful change (although not too impactful). Wonder when they will be going too far with things like “Mee6” and “Nitro”.
Their death is waaaay overdue. We literally jumped one cycle because the 2008 financial crisis and 0% interest rate.
Now there is no free money, and they need to extract value to seem a good investment, so they canibalize themselves and turn into shit.
Most of Elon stuff is doomed once reality catches on. Same with Uber. Same with streaming platforms. Same with Meta.
Also there is a new/old boy in the bubble and burst town, Microsoft and their AI push. It’s going to destroy them pushing them into overspending to keep up.
The twitter thing is sad, but honestly not a huge deal. I rarely used it anyhow.
The reddit thing is depressing, since I’ve been a huge supporter and user of Apollo for many years. It feels like getting stepped on and I feel for the developer Christian Selig who devoted so much time and energy to the app.
I hope nothing happens to Twitch in the way that Twitter and Reddit have though, the small time streamers I follow and support won’t survive a thing like that.
From everything I have observed, businesses are hunkering down for a recession in the next fiscal year. It explains the lay offs, the penny pinching, and puzzling decisions that look like business suicide.
For services that are free for users, advertising revenue and investment fund raisers are the only thing keeping them afloat. With banks like SVB getting seized by the FDIC, it’s starting to scare investors. Advertisers are seeing the writing on the wall that people will stop spending as much as they used to. We are also probably seeing jacked up pricing across the board because businesses are taking what they can before it’s gone.
So what’s left? Squeeze users for money. Additionally, shed users that actually cost them money and these tend to be power users. The question, which everyone seems to be assuming is a foregone conclusion, is if this shedding strategy will end up killing the service. In reality, we don’t know but the idealists would sure feel good if someone else ate their market share.
I’m just glad that federation is picking up steam in the social media space.
