Good read, gives me a lot of hope for this project.
I look forward to an exciting future with all of you.
(Also- hopefully this wasn’t posted already)
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_after_the_Reddit_blackout
This was written by the Lemmy devs.
IMO Reddit had been sinking into enshittification since New Reddit came around, with the suggested posts and the ads.
However. No one expected the process to lurch forward so quickly. I think the Reddit admins were trying to enshittify things slowly, but after looking at what happened with Twitter in the last year or so, they realized they could “tear the bandaid off” so to speak, and maintain (perhaps I should say attain?) profitability.
It’s a bunch of horseshit. I was never comfortable with so much of the internet being concentrated into corporate-owned spaces and I’m glad to see that other people feel the same way.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if their venture capital angels had finally told them “enough, we’re not going to keep throwing good money after bad indefinitely. We’re cutting you off, get profitable.”
Speaking purely as an armchair CEO, I think they could have done it by trimming the fat and making a few minor adjustments (a reasonable API price, for example). They have an income stream, they just needed to learn to live within that income stream’s means. But modern capitalism’s credo is “grow, grow, grow! Always grow!” And so that’s not the direction they went, and ironically I think it’s ultimately going to kill them.
Full circle : coming back to dessalins’s best words : History of Lemmy