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
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.
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.
Definitely accurate to the situation lol
Thank you for this! I never really thought about late stage capitalism but this post helped a lot.
Wow that’s a great read!
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 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
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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?
Not money per se, but the oil of the 21st century: data.
I guarantee it’s primarily about improving their ability to harvest and sell user data.
Exactly. The native apps can gather so much more info than a website and they have to kill third party apps to force people to use the official client.
This is where my mind goes. Kinda convenient that Twitter and Reddit, both likely particularly dangerous to those seeking power happen to be destroyed seemingly intentionally in the same year ahead of a sure to be insane U.S. election season.
100% power There’s parallels to the writer strikes Netflix ceo got like 2x the money that all the writers are asking for in bonus so it’s not about money It’s something else
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The timeline split after harambe. This is known
It is known.
I wonder what our alternate timeline selves are doing. Good for them, right?
In Timeline-α the Visitors didn’t turn away in disgust and Contact was approved. The Uplift process is well underway, environmental conditions have been stabilized and restoration is progressing well. Space travel is still restricted to the Solar System but Humanity is on track to full Membership. Ambassador Harambe has resumed his duties on the Council.
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.
I agree with most of what you said. I would say classifying SVB as a seizure is probably not accurate. The FDIC only came in when it was clear SVB was going to fold and in fact insured far more than the 250k per account guaranteed. Mainly to try and stem a run on midsize banks because
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Many companies had large holdings, undiversified in these banks
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The banks were borderline negligent with how they handled those deposits, sticking them all in “safe” government bonds that ruins liquidity.
Once the interest rate on the bonds was lower than the base borrowing rate, no one would buy the bonds instead of just buying new bonds with a much higher guaranteed return.
So, given that, I would say the FDIC instead bailed out the banks. Something they would never do for you or I, or even a business with similar valuation as any of the banks customers.
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Also what hasn’t been touched on very much in this thread is the increase in interest rates from the Federal Reserve. The money house has shut off and expansionary business policy won’t work for the foreseeable future even without a recession. All these internet companies have developed and grown in an essentially 0% interest rate environment that rewarded growth beyond all else. With rates increasing, investment in risky companies that may or may not grow is becoming a less attractive option and so I bet a lot of these non-profitable, growth-focused web companies are seeing liquidity dry up and are having to reach profitability to avoid bankruptcy since servicing new debt in this current interest environment is basically impossible without solid cashflow and a clear corporate vision.
This is leading to all these companies suddenly raising prices, cutting staff, choking competition, and cheaping out to try and break even instead of grow. It’s a paradigm shift.
Crazy to hear people talking about this stuff out in the wild. Feels like I’m on superstonk, only place I tend to hear anyone connecting these dots.
Speaking of superstonk, is there a good superstonk or wsb personalfinance lemmy community? I am subbed to the beehaw finance community, but it’s really not a tube yet and seems to be a bit more economics leaning than pure personal finance or investing.
The subs I spend a lot of time on were FIRE, financialindependence, wsb, and personal finance and I miss them lol.
The Canadian GameStop folks have a community on lemmy.ca, but we are still very few.
I would like to join a federated wsb community too, if there’s anyone with any integrity willing to run it impartially. Anyone running such a place has a conflict of interest imo, the tendency is moral hazard. At least with single stock communities you know their motive.
So why do layoffs at all if they don’t actually work? “People do all kinds of stupid things all the time,” Pfeffer says. “I don’t know why you’d expect managers to be any different.” https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/26/23571659/tech-layoffs-facebook-google-amazon
That’s a very enlightening article!
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 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.
The valuation of a lot of these sites was grossly inflated by the market, so when the largest shareholders saw their billions halve and know what the future holds, they start doing things to temporarily boost their profit margins and sell off the company.
Course-correcting, maybe? Web 2.0 really overstayed its welcome with Facebook/Twitter/Reddit being such dominant websites over the past 15+ years. Various reasons of greed, narcissism, and other factors finally popped the bubble.
I’m really enjoying the Feder-verse or whatever we’re calling it since decentralization can prevent a lot of this nonsense from ever occuring. It feels like a new approach to the late 90’s era of message boards and such.
Hey I’m new to Federverse, and trying to get my bearings. How can I bring value/help this alternative thrive? Any tips?
Just interact with it. Share your thoughts, post comments, make threads. Be nice. Bring friends if you like it.
Interest rates stayed at or around 0% for a decade or so. VC money was flowing like beer at a frat party. COVID accelerated that trend and probably pushed sites that had somehow not taken a bunch of VC investors into doing it as everything went online. Now the interest rates have spiked and the VCs want a return on their money.
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?
PeerTube could, but it needs more people to develop the Shorts feature, as well as proper client for mobile.
Is there any work being done on a proper mobile client? I also wasn’t aware of the Shorts feature on PeerTube, but then again, I haven’t checked the site in a minute. Might want to look into publishing videos on an instance sometime.
TikTok is literally owned by China.
One can only hope.
The twitter/elon thing is hilarious. I honestly do think he accidentally got himself into quite the pickle and now his pride is keeping him there. As for reddit and twitch, I don’t assume these are the surface-level-dumb moves that we think they are. My guess is that this is a calculated means of rolling out the changes they actually want by:
- overshooting
- letting everyone get mad
- backing off to their actual changes (or something close)
- letting everyone think they’ve won
- and finally push forward a bit more once everyone is preoccupied with the next thing
Internet users love to cancel shit, but at the same time, are always looking for the next thing to cancel. So as much as people hate twitter or facebook or tiktok or youtube or windows or nintendo or chick-fil-a or whatever, they’re all just looking for an excuse to forget all about it, and continue using their product as quickly as possible. And corporations know that, so they’ve worked “giving them that excuse” into their plans.
For a minority of users on reddit, there’s a line. For me, it’s forcing me to use new reddit. If that happens, I just have to quit, I can’t stand it. I don’t want to quit, I have a lot of subreddits I read.
But I saw the stats for the old school users vs new reddit/app users, and we’re outnumbered. Reddit knows they might lose thousands of redditors but they don’t care because lots will just switch to their toxic app and if they lose 5% of the stubborn old folk then so be it.
I’m ok with it. I like the tighter cozy feel of fediverse. there’s less antagonism and bloat.
Give it time.
That is to say, to the extent that we can, let’s be careful. We already see the same shit everyone criticizes Twitter for starting to show up on mastodon. It’s often not the platform that causes problems, it’s the people.
I think there needs to be a set of “commandments” for civil discourse on the internet. One specific rule I’ve made for myself but never heard anyone else mention is: don’t dogpile on downvoted comments. I think everyone feels a pull to do it, they see a controversial post that they agree with, they see the top few comments are more of the same…so they scroll down to the lowest voted replies, expand them if they’re hidden, get enraged by someone’s stupid world view, and jump into a flame war.
Some might lump that in with “don’t feed the trolls”, but I’ll counter with a second rule: it’s better to just not reply to someone than to accuse them of being a troll or a bot. There exist people who live with a wildly different set of information from you, and thus often have wildly different worldviews. And that’s ok. And if it turns out they actually are a troll or a bot, as long as you’re replying, they’re winning.
I agree. If someone makes an upsetting post, I ignore it. As far as my experience, engaging in it will only harm me. I see no value in responding. I even did a test. On RIF (it’s possible this is sitewide on all apps), if a post was in the karma negatives, I would have to click on it to see it. About 95% of the time, I agreed that I did not need to read that garbage, so I chose to ignore without expanding them. I appreciated all the pioneers that had to read that garbage at first and downvote it.
Anyway, there’s no sense in spending my leisure time becoming angry at internet strangers. I rather move on and engage in things that make me happy.
I do kind of think that if they’re downvoted so you don’t see them, I agree with you. But if no one ever challenges an idea, it easily appears as either consensus or maybe so obviously true no one can challenge it.
The stubborn old folk are the ones responsible for creating a significant portion of the content on Reddit. While they may appear to be in the minority, without their content, casual users will be less inclined to use Reddit.
I’ve been wondering about that. You know if there’s a youtuber with 10 million subs, you’d think they’re a big, important star on the platform? And then you find out that youtube gets 80% of their ad revenue from kids watching Baby Shark on a tablet, and your 10 million sub youtuber actually isn’t that relevant at all.
Well I was wondering if there’s a reddit equivalent to that. Like maybe reddit gets 60% of it’s revenue from Indian cricket fans and we don’t even know about it. I’m sure sports fans in general are a lucrative userbase. And then places like /r/funny… basically imagine who would be less likely to use an adblocker and old reddit and the app, without caring too much. That’s low-effort content that basically runs itself.
At least, that might be what they are gambling on. I do agree with you that the old guard are very important for developing good content. I just don’t know if reddit cares about good content anymore.
This is actually good for sites like Lemmy that have a more diverse and thoughtful user base. Reddit functions as a filter that takes on all of that thoughtless content so we are spare the bloat. I couldn’t care less if Reddit succeeds or not as long as Lemmy doesn’t turn into what it has become.
Outside social media, we also have Netflix pulling their own BS, and then lesser know sites/services that are near and dear to me are RARBG shutting down and Mullvad VPN removing port forwarding on July 1st. It’s been a rough month for me in my little online sphere.
