Hey all,

I was just listening to the Lex Fridman podcast where Mark Zuckerberg mentioned Meta’s plans for a federated platform. It got me wondering: Could Reddit follow that path too?

Are there technical or financial obstacles that might prevent this? More importantly, should Reddit even consider this move? Would it be a win or a loss for us, the users, and for internet culture in general? Keen to hear your thoughts on this!

(I’m a recent Reddit refugee, fed up with the situation over there. Found Lemmy searching for info on homelab during the blackout. Found all the main things I need here. And the community is great. Like Reddit used to be. Can’t see myself going back)

  • LostCause@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    I‘m gonna say NO and NO.

    If you still think spez has anything in mind even approaching this system, you haven‘t been paying attention. They just want to farm the users who are their product for as much money as possible. They grew a field of corn and now they reap. Imagine if the corn got feet and ran away, how inconvenient would that be?

    And yeah, some of that hunger for money and power is about to pop up here too, but then we can defederate and move on to better instances in the blink of an eye, especially if we‘re used to this system already.

    So knowing that is a possibility, why would they want to give us such a power? They‘re even taking the power of mods to have their subreddits private now to stop this. They are banning people who talk about Lemmy too much. If they could just frolick in their walled garden of Marketing and keep their products captive there, why federate or deal with competitors like that? Even their own apps are competition to be eliminated to small brained business dudes like spez.

    That is all for my first NO, my second NO is because I enjoy lemmy and kbin and other instances and I don‘t want it to be ruined by corporations taking over instances I like with bots or other subversive tactics. Best if they stay where they are and hopefully in 10 years or so only exist as a bad memory in my brain from before people took back control of the internet.