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)
If they were willing to allow the back-end access to their servers that would require, they wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with.
Is that the only way to do it?
You either need API access, which is what started this whole fiasco, or you’re relegated to scraping the site, which can be very cumbersome and prone to error.
reddit is better off being a closed platform.
Why?
so the cancer doesnt spread
The bots have been eating it alive for a while now.
@tallwookie i mean a corpse doesn’t get more dead…well no wait necromancy can fix that. so I am wrong.
reddit can’t federate, but if you’re a moderator in a big subreddit, let me know, I might try to write a script to clone all the posts in that subreddit to a brand new lemmy instance (obviously you won’t be able to after june 31st). I’m 100% serious. In fact, depending on the size of the subreddit, I might even be willing to federate it into my own instance.
I know they can’t as of now. More a question of future business decisions. Like meta saying they want to develop a federated platform.
I do mod a large sub. But not interested in cloning it. I’m of the opinion that things should just happen naturally.
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.
meta wants to do a federated plataform???
It is likely impossible because it would mean that the investors will have “lost.” There won’t ever be a way to make meaningful amounts of money off of Reddit if they did that. Anyone could just move to a less ad-ridden version of Reddit and just see Reddit posts from there. In fact, this is the very fight that Reddit is waging over its API access. So no, Reddit is likely to die off and be replaced by something else. And that something else can never be a big money maker.
Technically? Sure. But it would likely require rewriting a bunch of systems which would be pretty expensive and I don’t know why Reddit would want to do that right now.
Yeh. Maybe not right now. But I was frankly surprised to hear Zuckerberg openly talking about it. Must be in the zeitgeist.
His failed Meta VR project was essentially a federated system where various companies could run their own meta universes and visitors could cross over from one meta universe to the next.
Yea fuck that. I think it’s about enough of people making decisions about what I get to see.
You wouldn’t need to be on Reddit. But I see value in what Lemmy could bring to the table.
Even if they could, why would they?
So they don’t get left behind?? Dunno. Seems like people are starting to pay attention now to decentralised systems with big players now openly discussing it. If meta is serious about moving that direction, I don’t think it will be long for others to follow suit.
