Background
The ugly truth is, proven by the attitude of Reddit is unlikely going to change, especially when they are giving the ultimatum to replace mods and reopen subs by force. Even if u/spez back-off this time, Reddit isn’t going to get better, it would just be a slower and painful process
Given the stance Reddit is taking, there isn’t much Redditors and mods can do beyond leaving. Exactly like what we did for Facebook and many other social network or forum in the history. After all, it is their business, their servers and their bills to pay - we are merely passengers on this train wrecks, we are running but we should leave our brothers and sisters behind this time
Setting subs to private isn’t the best options either, the knowledge and discussions created by all the users are suddenly unreachable. That is not good for us and future generations
Humble suggestions
In my humble opinion, I suggest to consider the following:
1. Curfew mode
- only allow mega thread post to limit discussions, this is better than private as it provides more transparency on what’s going on and also allow knowledge to still be searchable for those who need them. It is a good transition instead of private, because private only encourage people to create alternatives and stay on reddit
2. Educate the crowd
With great power comes great responsibility, if you are still reading, you are likely more tech savvy or at least care more about the communities we built on Reddit. It would be nice if mods/Redditors provide guide to educate Redditors on:- a. The reason of the uprising
- b. Full guide on migrating to alternative services like
lemmy, this way the communities continues without being bounded to the a single platform - c. These two posts should be pinned so visitors knows where to go next
3. Preserve content and knowledge
- As mentioned, the collective knowledge for all these years are priceless, there should be effort to archive the knowledge or better, if migration to a new platform is possible
Discussion
I believe the most important is the education bit, it enables individual to not only leave but continue the communities meaningfully - the people is the community not the r/insert-sub-name
With people taken care of, the effort would be to preserve the our collective knowledge. It can be a long process, but it can happen in a curfew mode by restricting the sub
When both people and knowledge are taken care of, we can just switch the lights off just like how we did it with Facebook. Normal redditors can just give away our account to spammers and scammers and let u/spez moderate the empty platform
Call for Actions
I have taken action and created !AussieFrugal for members and mods of r/aussiefrugal. I suggest we collaborate and do the same for the subs we care if they does not exist here yet. Search before creating to avoid duplication. Use the same name so it is easier for new migrants
Also, since you are here, you should be able to help your community with migration as well by writing guides
Any discussion is welcome here or the same post on reddit. Also, great if you can share this post with mods, subs and the likeminded. So we can gracefully move forward together!
See you all on the better side of the internet
There is an option that reddit has zero ability to stop:
If redditors band together and commit to boycott any company who advertises through reddit until reddit reverses their changes.
Companies have been very careful about trying to not get tied into the protests. But now we make it so that reddit is poisoned fruit.
There is nothing reddit can do to stop this. No rules they can change to subvert it, because we can publicize this boycott on any and every other platform if they try to silence us.
Boycott companies that advertise through reddit, and that will throw a major wrench in their current income as well as further sour their IPO prospects.
Reddit moderators should make official alternate communities or atleast link a major lemmy community in their subreddit somewhere visible, like a pinned post, it’ll incentivise and give confidence to more users to come here to get their dose of content than to flock to other website like Instagram or YouTube.
Reddit Admins might be the biggest issue for doing this, but communities in Blackout are already pissing them off enough.
I had the same thing happen to me, After the reddit blackout started I went to r/piracy and saw that they got a backup community in the lemmy everyone talks about, it gave me more confidence about lemmy and I switched here.
That’s the approach I mentioned here, perhaps because in used to be mod as well
