We all know about how Reddit closed-sourced back in 2017 and will be killing off third-party apps this July, what will Lemmy.ml do to avoid facing the same fate? Reddit started off like this (open, aiming for freedom) and it all went downhill from there.

  • KNova
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    611 months ago

    I mostly agree, I don’t think I would block closed source servers as long as they weren’t promoting bigotry, and as long as the federation still worked properly. I don’t fault users of a service for the sins of their parent company. It’s the same reason why I probably won’t block the Instagram ActivityPub initially - need to see how it shakes out.

    • @[email protected]
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      1511 months ago

      That’s totally fine, but I remember when google users could communicate with XMPP. They captured all the users with better UI, etc, then closed it off.

    • comfy
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      511 months ago

      I have mixed feelings over faulting users for the sins of the service provider. I know that not everyone can care about everything, politics gets complex very quickly, but users are exactly what gives the service power. So I do fault them for continuing to use it. If a reasonable alternative exists, I think it’s important to stop supporting a dangerous company and to help start alternatives. Otherwise, inertia will just prevent any good changes.

      • KNova
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        511 months ago

        True. I’ve been gently encouraging my friends and online contacts to switch away from the big tech / centralized offerings. There is a lot less toxicity in the federated versions of social media right now.

        • comfy
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          711 months ago

          Yeah, it’s especially hard with social media, where a lot of their value is only because your friends use it. And your friends use it because most of their friends use it. So without a big event that shifts whole communities over, it can be unreasonable to expect people to “just move”, as much as I’d love that to happen.