Reddit Was a Good Business
I joined Reddit in 2008. I remember it as a perpetual series of discoveries. Every time I logged in, I would learn something I never would have seen otherwise. New technology. New comedy. New ideology. New pornography. New ability to interpolate a unique string of characters related to current events and suddenly take control of a fresh memetic stream of independent media. New feelings, identities, behavior patterns, collective ethical architectures, and business opportunities. I was an isolated adolescent allergic to all the authority and social structure in my churchy suburban youth. Reddit was an electric neon string dangling from infinity and buzzing with the secular hum of freedom, sex, and reason. I grabbed on and didn’t let go for fifteen years.
We must remember it was always a business. It was an advertising marketplace operated for profit. It happened to operate at a particular scale which afforded small groups of key thinkers subjective judgements of the value of abstract concepts. For example, the value of community trust in an ad business.
I am guilty of describing recent events as “the death of Reddit.” While it’s cathartic to type after watching a community so formative to my identity sink into the swamp of astroturfed parasocial media hosting the U.S. Congress thinks is the same thing as “the Internet,” it’s wrong. Reddit didn’t die, it just outgrew its ideals. What died was that stupid moose. Furthermore, I’m glad it’s dead. It lied to me. It convinced me to forget something very important that Frank Herbert tried to tell me a long, long time ago.
The Spice Must Flow
Most people just want content. Sad but true. People living in specialized industrial/postindustrial societies have access to infinite sources of worry restricted only by the awareness of imminent death. The role of computers in society according to almost everyone alive is to help them hang on to their jobs or to temporarily distract them from their jobs. You can put the secret truth of the universe on tap and the vast majority of people simply won’t care unless it helps with one of those two things. It’s human nature; getting angry and vocal about it doesn’t change it. You are entitled to try.
It is because we know we will wither and die that we construct apparatuses to care for us in our impending weakness. For this reason, businesses of a certain size either grow or disappear.
Steve Huffman is taking a lot of shit right now, and that’s fair. That’s his job. My friends, do not confuse the face of the business for the inherent nature of the business. It is composed of mortals. Worse, it’s composed of software.
September Is a Function of Connectivity
If you’ve migrated to a federated Reddit substitute this week, you may have already encountered ActivityPub’s biggest limitation. Defederation is a massive pain in the ass. When a popular instance decides to take its toys and go home, everybody who was federated with them gets kicked in the metaphorical dick while the network figures out how to heal. On a technical level, the reason this is so expensive has to do with the inherent limitations of client-server architecture, but that’s a topic for another day. Right now, defederation is being used the way it was arguably intended: to protect communities who feel threatened by massive growth. Before you know it, the natural forces of conglomeration that killed our beloved Silly Moose will turn defederation into the same political token that’s represented by today’s private API. The gnashing of teeth will echo across the internet as pseudointellectuals like me bemoan the “death of the Fediverse.” They will be as wrong then as we are now, and we will be old.
In these fleeting moments preceding imminent death, we must use technology to love one another.
I have complicated feelings on the idea of instances doing this defederation. I’m new to all this, so maybe this is natural. I mean, I’ve been peripherally aware of the fediverse for a few years. It was hard to miss after Twitter, but even before then I was keeping an eye on Matrix and PeerTube especially. But, never dipped my toe in until now.
On the one hand, I really resent the idea that my instance owner could simply be hiding part of the world from me over their personal opinions. Not just that, but silencing my voice in some corners, too. I know I could register accounts elsewhere but I don’t want more accounts, and how am I supposed to be knowing what I’m missing if it’s invisible to me already? I thought this is what federation was supposed to do: let me participate in anything from anywhere.
But as I’ve been watching some of this reddit stuff unfold, I guess it makes a lot of sense. Our current modern internet culture is inherently very insular. For any given person, there are bright beacons of strong attraction to those who think and feel like you do, and there are also dark areas of repulsion from communities whose ideals represent something that oppose yours. Online, like attracts like, and most people seem to really enjoy that. I think that most people are actually into social media for the entertainment value, and we all usually like to watch what we can relate with.
So for most users, this kind of thing probably really does improve their corners of the fediverse. It doesn’t have to be the end for people who want the freedom to read and write to any corner of any niche community or ideology. My wariness for being informationally controlled (fostered by recent commercial social media blowups) manifests in the fediverse as wanting my own instance, I think. There are a fair number of very small instances it seems like, and I’m assuming it’s because of people like me who felt the same pressure.
This puts me at ease, I think. I still have a way to remain independent, I just need to take responsibility for it. I’ll learn a bit more about how it all works, and maybe help improve it along the way to make it easier for others to achieve, too. I wonder if this isn’t a good thing for internet culture, really - encouraging the establishment of these new kinds of little lagrangian independence points people can be drawn to, between the extremes of the rest of the internet’s social attractors and repulsors, which we can leave for the people who really want that.
I think there will be much simpler and better alternatives to defederation in future, we just haven’t built them yet. I.e. ways to just achieve the targeted goal without the huge blast radius.
For example a community (or whole instance) might be set up so that only subscribers/locals can post and comment, and users from instances with open registration have to apply first before they are allowed to participate. Vice Versa an instance could have a default setting to hide communities from certain other instances, and let users customise that. I think that would address the main reasons beehaw defederated but without nearly as many downsides
The fediverse was designed to segregate people. There was always something I didn’t like about it and I could never figure it out.