Kichae

@Kichae@kbin.social

Astronomer & video game data scientist with repressed anger

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Kichae,

Ah. I got woooshed!

Kichae,

The community size thing is going to be interesting as the space grows. The fact that there are functionally infinite name spaces means that "politics" doesn't just get to become the default politics discussion space for everyone wandering into the place. Lemmy.ca/c/politics can be a very different place than Lemmy.ml/c/politics, which will be very different from lemmy.world/c/politics, which will be very different again from beehaw.org/c/politics.

And you can suppose that everyone will just use the biggest one by default, but I don't think that's necessarily true. The biggest subreddit got that way predominantly because of their name, and there's a good chance that people'll see their local one first, not the biggest. Or that they'll see multiple of them, and end up engaging with multiple communities before they realize what's going on and settle on the one that suits them best.

There will always be a biggest, but there can be a larger number of smaller, lively communities because they don't need to take on names like "r/truepolitics" or "r/onguardforthee" (which is a so very discoverable and intuitive r/Canada alternative).

We'll have to see how the dynamics play out over time.

Kichae, (edited )

IQ probably has little to do with it. It's socialization and learned expectation that are acting as a filter currently.

Kichae,

Yeah. Really, new admins should understand that they should be seeding their new instance, but the last couple of weeks have been... Kinda nuts? So, this won't really be an issue for most users long term. It'll be a thing for admins on small or niche sites that want to ensure they're discoverable and that their users can access the best communities.

Kichae,

Well, instances are all different, independent websites. As an admin, if I can't name a community whatever I want on my own website, I'm probably not participating in this ecosystem.

Plus, 1000 times more posts get posted to r/bigsub than you or anyone ever reads, and 10,000 times as many comments. It creates an environment where no one is actually discussing anything, and are just jockeying for attention.

You won't actually miss anything except for big vanity numbers by just choosing the community you like best for a topic and just... Ignoring the others.

Kichae,

People love to blame the victim for defending themselves over the problematic person who is abusing them, because if they acknowledge that someone is being abusive that kind of morally obligates them to step in.

And they very much don't want to do that.

And obviously the exploitation of users for their knowledge and content so that the owners of Reddit Inc. can gain wealth for sitting on their thumbs is different from the kind of abuse one's mind might go to when the word is raised, but it's the same dynamic.

Someone is claiming mistreatment, those around them are annoyed by the claims, not by the mistreatment, because the person standing up for themselves is putting onlookers in the dangerous position of examining their relationship to that mistreatment.

And they don't wanna.

Kichae, (edited )

I've been abused. I suffer from ongoing complex PTSD from that abuse.

I have some fucking perspective, thank you very fucking much.

And that perspective is that the word is broadly defined, and that exploitation is fucking abuse. It's not physical abuse, no, and I didn't say that it was. I'm fact, I was very careful to avoid such comparisons. But exploiting people for their time and labour so that you can generate obscene amounts of wealth for yourself is exploitative, it involves lying to people, both implicitly and explicitly, and it involves engaging in emotional and psychological manipulation.

And that's a type of fucking abuse. It's the exact same type of abuse that narcissists inflict on their victims. It's just being done in a way that the law and our culture sees as legitimate, because there's a lot of money involved, and we all fall under the yolk of rich mother fuckers who think they deserve more from us, just because they already have money.

I make the comparisons not because I lack perspective, but because I have it.

Because corporate behaviour like this feels too fucking familiar, given that perspective.

Kichae,

The question is, does Reddit ownership believe the money is in LLM training data or not. We've seen tech leadership jump on all kinds of bandwagons in the last few years, none of which have panned out. I don't think LLMs will, either, but every time one of these things gains some limelight, someone with an established tech company seems to believe they're about to make a lot of money.

And in this case, they actually might. Just not off of the tech, but off of an IPO where they centre the tech as the opportunity for new investors.

But I have no idea if they're smart enough to see the scam and run the play, or if they're true believers or not.

Kichae,

The API will come. It's still very early days for the kbin project. It's, uh, kind of alpha software.

Kichae,

Once you have enough of it to live a comfortable life, money just becomes about power. So, what we have is some spoiled rich asshole who is used to having influence and power being shown that most of that was a gift. That gift has been recinded, and so the only control he has left is money.

He's spending some of Reddit's current and future earnings on stepping on necks. Because that's what the cash was going to be used for, in one way or another, anyway.

Kichae,

People get suckered into the sunk-costs fallacy all of the time, and managers of large communities are going to be extra prone to it when they're told they'll have "their communities" taken away from them.

Remember, these people are fighting to "save Reddit". They see the possibility of having corporate friendly scabs take over as a community-destroying and a Reddit destroying proposition.

The event horizon of a black hole is the 2-dimensional surface across which the possibility of turning back is eliminated. At that point, space and time become so twisted that there is no longer an "outwards" direction. Every road leads in. But in supermassive black holes, that event horizon is so far away from the centre that the actual tidal forces -- the forces which pull things apart when they're near large gravity sources -- are remarkably weak. You would not notice the difference between being 1 km above the event horizon and 1 km beneath it. If you weren't being careful, you could cross that event horizon without ceremony and without realizing you'd doomed yourself.

This is how it is with big services, too. The thing that makes them irrelevant happens long before revenues or usage decline. In fact, there's likely still growth! But there'll be an inflection point in the acceleration that those who don't know what to look for won't even notice. Then it could take months, or even years, for things to turn around and decay into nothing of value.

These mods are trying to save something that has already experienced its killing blow. Something that will cease being what it was long before it ceases to be. Something that has already quietly -- though not too quietly -- slipped past the event horizon.

Kichae,

The John Oliver stuff is happening on Reddit, though. That's where the attention is, that's where his face is being plastered everywhere. It really has nothing to do with anything here.

It's all people who don't want to bebherr, sending the message that they don't want over there to change.

Plus he's probably heard of Reddit, but not Lemmy, kbin, or the Fediverse. And he has no dog in

Kichae,

Sure, but anyone complaining about defederation in the context of "group think" probably isn't thinking about how much it sucks that small spaces can't moderate well enough.

Kichae, (edited )

If you want like 10,000 instant karma, bet on a New post and say snarky shit. If it gets picked to be one of the magic posts of the day, you win.

Just don't say anything meaningful, or you'll fall below the next person commenting for the lulz.

That's what a healthy community looks like. Right?

Kichae, (edited )

If you want to hang out with the Nazis, just say so and go. No one is stopping you.

Kichae,

Check out a Calckey instance (I think it's a significantly better UX compared to Mastodon, and they federate) and their PWA. It's pretty good. But there's a list of native apps for it here: https://calckey.org/apps/

Kichae,

Yes, Calckey is to Mastodon as kbin is to Lemmy. Different pieces of website software that do similar things and cross-communicate.

Calckey is less popular, but is developing at a faster rate, and is much more open to community feedback.

Kichae, (edited )

Media hosting is the biggest expense, and there are services that make that significantly cheaper through sharing and deduplication.

A major instance can probably get by on a few hundred dollars a month. If it has, say, 100k active users, and 1% of them donate $5 a month, then not only is there enough to cover infrastructure expenses, but they can also put some aside in a rainy day fund, use it to expand hosting to other platforms (lemmy.world is made possible, at least initially, by donations to mastodon.world), or even pay instance-level mods.

Mstdn.social, a very busy Mastodon site, has 200k users and runs on a 32 core VPS with 128GB of RAM. Comparable unmanaged VPS packages go for around $300/month. After that, it's all media storage.

Kichae, (edited )

If you're expecting everyone to leave Reddit, you're going to be disappointed. Most Reddit users do. Not. Care. They'll stay for as long as Reddit entertains them.

The Twitter migration was actually a really great thing for the Fediverse. It diversified Mastodon, and made it an actually lively space. It's still a nerdy space, but it's so much more than it was. It's a genuinely general and engaging microblogging space. And while, yes, it doesn't have everything that draws the Twitter clout chasers, celebrity watchers, and journalists or politicians, it's a viable alternative for people who are looking to actually engage with each other.

The same is true here, and will be true after tomorrow.

Edit: Autocorrect hates me

Kichae,

Smaller communities may mean fewer posts, but once a community hits a critical limit, it's still more posts than most people will read in a day.

This is only really an issue for really niche communities that haven't migrated here yet, and if all they find here when they come to explore is the exact same posts as on Reddit, but with no comments, then what's even the point of moving?

If they didn't come out of the principle of what Reddit is doing, then it will be the content that ultimately makes them move. And that content needs to be different, and better, than what they can get on Reddit. Not the same, but with zero comments.

Kichae,

Yes. The ability for users and admins to literally choose their feature sets while still getting access to the same content is a big, big plus for for the distributed and federated model

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