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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Well that’s our fault for letting information get congregated in a centralized service to be fair. Any information that is stored without redundancy on a single service should be considered already lost.

    The Fediverse doesn’t fix this by the way, as far as I know. The data can be accessed from other instances, but as I understand it the data still lives on the instance. The day an instance does, poof, all the information it contains goes away.

    But! It makes it easier to make information redundant, by having an instance that automatically archives information for example.

    We had a problem, many people knew that we had a problem but we did nothing to fix it. We have the same issue on StackOverflow or even GitHub, by the way (although the latter is a bit mitigated by people having local copies of the repositories for example). It will come bite us in the arse one day.



  • Not much that wouldn’t also kill them, I think.

    Reddit has become too massive for its own good, and it lost its sense of community from the early years. There was a few nice subs, but they usually ended up being popular for exactly this reason, and they ended up being connected to the “big centralized Reddit bubble” (if that makes sense), which killed the community in the process.

    My best memories of fun or interesting conversations on Reddit were actually not made on particular subreddits, but more on recurrent stickied threads on some subreddits that only a few regulars opened and read. Those had a real sense of community.

    So yeah, Reddit lost me as a user these past few days, but not 100% because of the actual changes that they made - I think I was already dissatisfied with it and that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s more like a combination of the massive user base and the way the website works that kind of suffocated communities. They cannot really change that, as they would probably not survive changes that are too big or a drastic reduction in the user base.

    The Fediverse could suffer from the same issues if it becomes wildly successful of course, but the fact that it is federated adds another layer of separation between community circles, and I think that’s enough for mitigating that problem a little bit.