This morning when I opened Infinity to check Reddit, I saw the announcement above: they're going subscription-only. Ironically enough, I couldn't scroll down to see the rest of the message including prices, if there were any. I also couldn't see if there was a button to close the message or start a paid subscription. I couldn't proceed to Reddit at all. My only option was to close the app completely. So I uninstalled it.
That's it for me using Reddit on mobile! Can't say I'll miss it much. But I added a LOT of content to Reddit that way, so it's their loss. Fuck you, spez!
As I recall, Reddit really dragged their heels in implementing GDPR-mandated data checkouts, citing technical challenges and privacy issues, but I'm sure it was more about the technical challenges and laziness (old codebase that has kind of sucked since forever and they're not keen on touching it). This was when the law went into effect in 2018.
I requested archives of my data from Reddit as per GDPR a few weeks ago, and it's still pending. And the page said "oh, uh, we'll provide them within 30 days." ...which is well within the letter of the law, if not the spirit. Other sites I've requested my data from can provide it within days, usually.
All I can say as someone who's been perplexed about Reddit's tech side for a long time is that it's pretty damn emblematic of the whole site.
I have a Mastadon, AND a Kbin now. I'm trying to sign up for different Federated services and link 'em all together. I'm loving this new protocol so much. It's quiet...
It feels similar to the early 2000's internet and I'm loving it.
11 years of posts, most of them just trying to helping out others, are now gone. Thanks Power Delete Suite! I feel like I just had a breakup that was my choice,...it feels really disappointing but I'm free!
I know there’s only a few days before 3rd party apps no longer function so this idea may be too late…
I’ve been reading about scripts that automatically delete all of your Reddit posts and comments. I would like to see one of those scripts written into the third party apps so that I can nuke the site from orbit upon my escape. It’s the only way to be sure.
The Future of the Threadaverse. Is a Lot More Growth a Good Thing?
I’m a recent refugee from Reddit and a very long time social network user. When the Apollo app announced its demise, I joined kbin.social and beehaw.org and love these new networks. The discussions seems much more reasoned and friendly. I do miss some of the more esoteric groups such as music theory and jazz. I’m sure they’ll be created as the threadiverse (kbin and lemmy) continue to grow. In this case, growth will be good. Is there, however, a point where these new networks get too big?
Imagine 56 million daily users (the current figure for Reddit) using the threadiverse platforms. If they were divided evenly into groups of 10,000, that would be 5,600 instances. Surely, such growth would take years, unless Huffman pulls another catastrophic move such as making you pay to be member and having to view ads as well. Even if he did, I doubt Reddit would completely go away. It would join myspace and AOL in the backwaters of the Internet.
Back to my point. Let’s say there are 20 million daily users. Magazines on kbin and communities on lemmy would have 100’s of thousands or even more that a million subscribers. The subreddit r/worldnews has 32 million subscribers. There could also be 100’s of thousands of magazines/communities. Reddit has 2.8 million subreddits. I know communities are tightly limited on beehaw.org, only being added when there is sufficient interest and support for them. On kbin, it appears any member can create a magazine. I could be wrong. Lemme.ee also allows members to create communities without restriction as far as I can tell.
Assuming there were enough instances to support such a volume of users, would that be a good thing or would discussions turn into flame wars, vitriol, and personal attacks? Even if such things were kept under control would threads become full of pointless or uninformative comments that kept you from reading quality posts. I don’t know one way or the other although I suspect, at some point there would be such a thing as too big. Most likely, it will take years for the threadiverse to grow so there’s plenty of time to plan and implement mechanisms to handle it.
Unfortunately, these are problematic when dealing with instances that are not your home instance. Any links to the post page will be absolute remote instance URLs, which means you cannot interact with the post (e.g. leave a comment). The URL really needs to be made relative to your home instance for that to work, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to fix that for a specific post. I can only fix the URL to the magazine/community itself and then hope to locate the post within it again.
If there is a way to get home instance-relative RSS feeds, I'm all ears! Failing that, I might work on a scraper that can take URLs of the form:
and generate RSS feeds out of them? But I don't want to reinvent the wheel if something like this is already possible?
It might also be useful to someone trying to write an app with a multireddit-type feature? I will definitely release source if I come up with anything.
While wiping my reddit account I remembered I still had my other old and novelty accounts to wipe so I get to feel that satisfaction multiple times over.