That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
This article explains it pretty well. Though it focuses on Mastodon and similar Twitter clones, which all suffer from being clones of a dog shit idea for social media.
Op-ed: Why the great #TwitterMigration didn’t quite pan out
Largest shortcoming is that in order to see any content, you (or someone else on your instance) needs to follow someone/thing else from a different instance, and the only way to do that is to pour over hundreds or thousands of other websites. This means that objectively, the best experience for a new user is to join the largest instance available, which kind of defeats the purpose of federation. Also, 99%+ of users couldn’t care less about federation and there aren’t (m)any other selling points so nobody cares to leave the platforms they’re already established on.
This is a good criticism of federated social media. I must spend much more time finding cool stuff. But after being stroked on the back by algorithms that are pretty good at guessing what I’m into, I’m too lazy do do all that jazz by myself