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Content index
It is possible that in recent days you have come across articles on Reddit, some well written, others instead they only risk creating a bit of confusion. We have also decided to give a small summary of what is happening also because it affects us particularly closely and let's see together why.
What is Reddit, first of all?
It is a social network that is now almost 20 years old and is very different from its more famous competitors (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc). It is in fact based on self-managed communities, a bit as if it were a collection of many forums on any topic. Each community has its own "username" and it is found under the "r" category so we will have reddit.com/r/lealternative where reddit.com is the site name, /r/ is the community category, and lealternative is our community username.
You can build your own home page by signing up to different communities so that you can almost always only see things that interest you and not things shared by people you follow (as normally happens with other social networks).
This was a mini sprinkle to make sure everyone can understand what we're talking about.
What's up with Reddit and what does Le Alternative have to do with it?
For those who want to know in short (but we still advise you to read everything): Reddit will charge (at a high price) for its API, therefore closing the door to the majority of third-party applications that could be used until today. There was a huge community strike and Reddit administrators went so far as to remove the moderators who were against them and replace them with those aligned with them. In all this it has existed for a few years Lemmy, a social network of the fediverse therefore perfectly compatible with Mastodon, PeerTube and company. If Mastodon may be the free equivalent of Twitter, Lemmy is Reddit.
We at Le Alternative together with Polyverse we have been managing the server for more than a year feddit.it, based right on Lemmy, where We have been welcoming hundreds of people who have been fleeing from Reddit for days arriving in a few days to have over a thousand subscribers.
The long version
As we said, these communities are all self-managed by moderators who do this for free and out of passion. And the communities themselves often arise among enthusiasts. We say this because it is a fundamental part of what happened: Reddit has become what it is today also thanks to the incredible free work of the moderators which, it is estimated, is worth around 3.4 million dollars every year 1.
The Reddit app
Reddit therefore has an interesting structure but its site is a repository of tracers and advertising 2, not to mention its official application with 5 tracers and 47 permits 3. Over time they were therefore born many applications (And sites) to read Reddit both if you are not logged in or if you are logged in but without going through their site or their official application.
The bees
This was possible thanks to the fact that Reddit's APIs were free to use so anyone could exploit them to create applications and bots to manage communities.
Recently though, and probably because Reddit is about to go public 4, it has been decided that the APIs will no longer be free but will have an excessively high cost. So high that there will probably no longer be any applications that can use it. For example, Apollo, one of the most famous applications for Reddit has already said that it will close soon 5 because it would have to pay around 20 million a year to keep its application alive 6.
The reaction of the communities
Here comes the part fun: many communities, even numerous ones with millions of members, have made their subreddit private (this is how the communities are called). A two-day strike was initially planned but saw that it had no influence on the CEO of Reddit 7 some have decided to close their doors indefinitely 8.
Most communities have polled their subreddit first and have often been asked to shut down indefinitely as a result.
However, the Reddit administrators have done something, in our opinion, very serious. They began to remove the moderators who were against them (remember that we often talk about historical moderators who have worked for free for years) by promoting people who were not interested in the strike as moderators 9 10 11.
Reddit, Feddit and Lemmy
All this brought an incredible influx of people up Lemmy. Lemmy it is in fact a sort of free and open Reddit and anyone can manage a server. It's part of the fediverse and therefore it is compatible and federated with the various software. as Mastodon, PeerTube, Friendica, Pleroma, Pixelfed and so on.
The server managed by the developers has gone from 1000 to almost 30 thousand registered people. The Lemmy developers were literally besieged by notifications and requests 12. All Lemmy servers have had an incredible increase in users, including the one managed by us and Polyverse that is to say feddit.it 13.
Lemmy has become one of the software with the most registered users in the fediverse 14 with around 200 thousand people at the time of writing this article.
Thousands and thousands of people have therefore flocked to Lemmy and we are sure that this is only the beginning!
Here you will find the our article on Lemmy and if we have intrigued you then we are waiting for you upstairs feddit.it where dozens of new communities such as have already been born Informatics, Feddit Replies, Coffee Italy, Personal finance, LGBTQI+, Cooking and recipes And Universitaly: universities & university students in addition to those already present for some time: Digital Ethics, Reader's Corner, Domestic, European and international politics, Retrogaming and nostalgia, Journalism and information disorder, Science and innovation, Agora Music And Televisions (Cinema & TV Series).
United people can make a difference and make the internet a better place, we are waiting for you! 🧡
•- Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth $3.4 million a year on Reddit alone[↩]
- Blacklight on Reddit.com[↩]
- Reddit Exodus Report[↩]
- Reddit aims for IPO in second half of 2023 – The Information[↩]
- Apollo for Reddit is shutting down[↩]
- A developer says Reddit could charge him $20 million a year to keep his app working[↩]
- Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout 'will pass'[↩]
- Indefinite Blackout: Next Steps, Polling Your Community, and Where We Go From Here[↩]
- r/AdviceAnimals[↩]
- Post about Mastodon[↩]
- r/Piracy[↩]
- Update from Lemmy after the Reddit blackout[↩]
- Feddit on FediDB[↩]
- Lemmy on FediDB[↩]
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