Kinda what I meant by plastics

I’m more worried about the plastic, pesticides, degraded pharmaceuticals and heavy metals myself

Here’s the thing - we’ve been raised from birth to think “people don’t make things, companies do”.

Most people have never used software that isn’t company branded, they’ve never sat in a chair made by someone they know, they’ve never pulled food out of the ground. Almost all jobs set someone up doing a service with a supply chain behind them or doing one small step of something bigger.

It’s learned helplessness. They don’t have the concept of how they could do things outside of the hierarchy - solid chance they’ve tried, and since their skills are hyper-specialized and rely on big, expensive tools, they found they had a lot of gaps.

Anything you do outside of a company is a hobby to most people. And even then, people organize into sports leagues and buy fancy toys instead of just meeting up in the park with a ball… Do you really need to play by professional rulesets when you’re just trying to exercise?

This time around, I didn’t bother to explain why the decentralization is so important to my friends and family - even the technical ones are almost afraid of the idea of it.

Instead, I told them about the ways Reddit has picked up the harmful strategy that Facebook used, and that makes mobile gaming so addicting yet so unfulfilling: show them less of the content they want to change the reward schedule, training you to use the app longer for a smaller dopamine hit. Show you content that will make you feel angry, driving up engagement. And most importantly, always wave the promise of another dopamine hit.

The app is eggregious - it sprinkles in stuff from top communities I left a long time ago because they suck, it gives you suggestions for new communities and presents them like interaction from other users, and it sends you notifications to tempt you back in all the time.

And this is just the beginning, it’s going to get a lot worse With all the other social networks eyeing their own strategies to squeeze their users, it’s going to suck across the board, and good luck trying to build relationships outside these platforms

I think it’s important to remember we’re animals, and we’re not just trainable, we’re the most trainable by a large margin. The best of us have just a handful of moments where we see beyond our instincts and conditioning, and decide to train ourselves

This project is important, because it can give us back communities small enough to get to know each other, while providing a larger forum for ideas, and with a design that can shrug off attempts to control it.

It’s going to fragment. Sections of it will break off into echo chambers, admins will sell out their users, and parts will offer a curated walked garden hosted. But it can survive all that because of one simple truth - unless one person captures the majority of the network, they’re going to have to cut off the best part of the network. Social media can be profitable without sucking, but to rake in profits it has to suck - and even then, we can start up servers for friends and family, and rebuild the network organically

I’m working for an app streamlined enough I can send it to my mom and have her sign up without getting scared off, and I think I’ve got a solid idea of how to improve discovery of communities without becoming distributed rather than decentralized. Other people are building their own visions of what this can become, and a lot of people are writing impressive code (Lemmy has no business scaling as well as it has), and the beauty of it is that it all competes while adding to the whole.

I’ve been at it for 30 hours now, but I can’t shake the feeling that me getting this out this out in the next few days is going to matter if this is going to become what I hope instead of another shard of Reddit.

But every time I step away to take a breather, I end up back on here and see a glimpse of what this could be

The only way to change the world is to release something self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing and intrinsically positive, and hope it grows

You underestimate the power of addiction.

The official app isn’t a bad thing because it’s buggy and has ads, that sucks but I’ve used much worse apps that offer less. The amount of ads and how easy they are to click accidentally is ridiculous though

It’s bad because it’s built to do what Facebook did - it always gives you something to see and a reason to keep going. Have a nice, curated mix of science and shit posts? Let’s throw some crap from the front page in there along with the ads! No one responded to your comments? We’ll make suggestions look like someone is interacting with you! Haven’t used the app in a few hours? Here’s some posts delivered in a notification to get you back in there

I left Facebook for Reddit because I realized I didn’t really enjoy it and often ended up feeling worse after using, and when the experiments they were doing came out I payed close attention. It was a real slap in the face when I saw Reddit doing similar stuff, and I checked out alternatives like tildes but nothing else was scratching the itch so I put it on the back burner.

For those of us who aren’t going back, this wakeup call was a blessing. It’s a strong reminder that corporations not only don’t care about us, they can’t - they might act friendly sometimes, but they wouldn’t hesitate to poison the water supply if they thought it would bring greater profits

I’ll add that I think another aspect to this is: if the site declines quietly, you’ll end up with users shrugging and either continuing to use it or not. Most people don’t understand why this matters at all, and if the post quality declines it probably will be a lot like Facebooks decline. People knew it got worse, but the prevailing narrative is “that’s just how social networks work, the kids are always jumping on the next thing”.

By doing this, it makes it very clear that the mods and power users are pissed by actions taken by Reddit. People are starting to hear about it, but it’s not common knowledge.

If people hear “Reddit users protested then left because of Reddit corporate”, investors are going to be pissed, advertisers are going to find it less attractive, and (most importantly) when discord or YouTube consider their own anti-poweruser moves (which they’re currently talking about) they’ll remember “we need to be careful with changes or we’ll have a reddit moment”

I think this all started with Musk and his instance that despite pissing off users left and right, he’s made Twitter more profitable than ever and only kicked off bots and scammers. It’s absurdly unlikely (not like he’s releasing numbers and they are deciding to not pay bills).

But by creating that very attractive narrative, other social media companies are looking for their own ways blatantly grab cash

I’m working on a Lemmy app now, and I will say the documentation is pretty rough - I’ve had to do a lot of reading through source code. The data types are well defined, but there’s no explanation - you kind of just get the name of the route, and if you’re lucky a short sentence about it.

I’ve worked with much worse, but it’s an entirely different experience than working with the Reddit API

They also could have taken loans to reinvest in growth. From buying alien blue, to their api, to backend changes to add new ad offerings and whatever else they sell to companies… They’re all major efforts, and probably include marketing campaigns

If they took loans to grow… Well if you grow explosively it’s a huge win, but if you don’t you’re weighted down moving forward. And investors are going to love it, since they don’t care about breaking even, they care about that one investment that’s going to go 100x or more

That’s the advice CorgySkog gave them lol

Maybe I will! Maybe I spent the last few hours learning new tech and digging through source code to the websockets to play nice so I could make it totally platform agnostic! Maybe I named it flemmy and am on course to overtake jerboa in features with another few days of focus!

You always say you’re proud but never believe in me dad!

Nah, that’s where the federation comes in. The tech has a lot of room to grow, but you never have to move to join the “winning” group for a topic - you just have to sub

Moving forward, there’s already talk about how/if you should reconcile overly similar groups across servers. It’s certainly possible, and discovery is definitely going to improve quickly - the only question is can Lemmy hold onto the new users long enough to get past the growing pains

Not Lemmy, but that exists. Libreddit is one of the “mirrors”, individual subs have been cloned in Lemmy too

I’ve been using it daily for 13 years and sporadically before that, and frankly Lemmy feels more like the platform I joined. Wave by wave, Reddit got watered down even as its essence spread to niche communities. I’ve spent years unsubscribing to big subreddits and finding smaller ones - on some level, it’s kind of nice to sub to everything that seems remotely interesting again

But I definitely get you. It just feels like the end of an era, I left other social networks because they were sucking up my time and giving nothing back, even up to now Reddit has been more good than bad (thanks to my carefully curated feed that the app likes to add to)

I spent a lot of the last week using it one last time, then this weekend started looking at solutions moving forward. On one hand, the replacement has been a step down… On the other, it’s improving where Reddit has long been in decline

It’s been an emotional week

Everything on the internet is just bloat now, unfortunately

Weirdly, Microsoft is the one company that seems to be trending in the right direction (granted, with many, many missteps along the way). Or maybe they’ve just kept walking while most other tech companies race to the bottom

Oh…I think I just understood why I’ve always hated Twitter so much.

I haven’t read your username yet, because I don’t particularly care who you are (or anyone really), only what you say. And what you said was a good thing to say, so now I actually read your username to see if we run into each other later

Seconded.

Oh, it’s already like that - they shove posts from popular subs (that I don’t sub to for a reason) straight into your feed, and if they have nothing relevant they turn new sub suggestions into alerts and posts from a random sub of yours as notifications.

I like my 3rd party apps, but I don’t hate the official app enough to quit.

I do hate when my apps wear down my mental health though, so here I am. Hell, I’m considering taking a swing at a 3rd party Lemmy app myself…