*Published: 2023-07-04* ![[Pasted image 20230704172442.png]] ## Losing a Friend [Reddit](reddit.com) has moulded me into who I am today. Thirteen years of daily, multi-hour sessions (!) digging through the rabbit holes of this sprawling multi-forum mega-website has shaped my personality, opinion, and even worldviews! It even spawned its own in-jokes, culture and meta, from jolly ranchers, to broken arms, shoeboxes. It made me feel part of a community. But everything changed in June 2023. The news of Reddit introducing a hostile API pricing strategy came through, designed to cut third party application developers out of the Reddit ecosystem. I was put off by their approach to monetising the platform, and started to look into alternative places for discussion and lurking. ## A Different Approach: Federation ![[Pasted image 20230704173221.png]] There are some fundamental differences which blocks a lot of people from jumping over to [ActivityPub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub) based projects, which allow federation between servers. The most popular one emulating Reddit is [Lemmy](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy). > Federated servers function as independent nodes in a decentralised network where each server can communicate and share information with one another. This setup allows for enhanced resilience and censorship resistance, as content is not centrally controlled or stored, and the network can remain functional even if individual servers go down. In a similar vein, [Mastodon](https://mastodon.social/explore) is a federated alternative to [Twitter](https://twitter.com). In the conventional digital realm, the interactions are straightforward: users communicate with a central server. The simplicity of this model is user-friendly (and very scalable!) but has obvious problems, which Reddit is experiencing now. Meanwhile the fediverse introduces a more resilient, censorship-resistant model, where users communicate with a server, and ***servers can also interact with other servers***. It's a decentralised-lite model where the network's functionality doesn't rely on a single entity's stability or goodwill, but each instance is standalone. ## The Cost of Entry ![[Pasted image 20230704173441.png]] The learning curve is steep. Navigating the fediverse demands a certain level of understanding about its topology. It's akin to learning a new language but the payoff is worth it if you can find the right communities. The difficulty of entry also creates a natural gatekeeping effect, where only those who have put in the effort to figure out what the hell is going on are the ones who make it into the community. This creates a surprising realisation, in that the quality of Reddit discussions have declined due to the sheer number of people talking over each other, devolving into a hive-mind, groupthink and popularity contest. At some point in the past 13 years I stopped contributing content to Reddit and only lurked. Some time spent in Lemmy and the Fediverse has shown a more local, friendly feeling of discussion. People are happy to chat back and forth, I am more open to contributing instead of lurking because I feel that my opinion didn't matter. The way federation works made sense to me, but as I read more and more reddit threads, it dawned on me that the average user just do not understand this new paradigm shift. - How do servers communicate with other servers? - Where does my user account live? - What happens when servers defederate against another? - How does persistence work? - What about splintered communities across servers? Even I took awhile to get my head around what federation really meant in a practical sense. My [own instance](https://lemmy.jtmn.dev/), only synced forward and didn't scrape previous posts and [comments](https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/federation_getting_started.html#fetching-comments). It took me awhile to figure out that this is by design. Its still early days, but I definitely see some potential. I hope the movement doesn't die out because it has the chance to become something much bigger, driven by the community. ## References - [Article on The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/5/23749188/reddit-subreddit-private-protest-api-changes-apollo-charges) - [Apollo Closure Announcement](https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14nb5qs/today_is_apollo_for_reddits_last_day_and_i_just/) - [Apollo Closure Discussion](https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/)