The loss of the forum like help threads will probably be the most impactful thing. We can build communities elsewhere, but the 8 years old post about a problem only you and the OP is having is super valuable.
There was talk of someone populating a Lemmy instance with reddit data.
There is a lot of reddit data on a torrent somewhere aparrently.
My hope is that things like Chat GPT can now become that source. I can only assume all those historical posts were used as training data.
ChatGPT doesn’t understand the things it says. It shouldn’t be treated as a source of truth. It can be tripped up by nuance, or by statements which require an understanding of the concept of syntax. For example, if you ask it what is the longest 5-letter word, it will confidently give you an answer.
I am so happy to see people coming together and moving away from commercial platforms. It feels silly to say it, but it seems like it is a step in the right direction. It is technological and social progress. Decentralization is a really fantastic tool and it seems to be a system that cannot be controlled internally or externally. Mastodon has been great, and I expect Lemmy to be even better.
To anyone reading, if you have any extra cash, look into making a small donation to your instance. The people running it are not just putting in time, they are likely paying hundreds a month to rent server space.
This is great, many more subreddits should do something like this. But in the end, it’s us, the end users, who should do the actual protesting since it’s us who have the power to change things. I’ve decided not to give them any kind of traffic from now on. Me, by myself, won’t make much impact but if more of us did the same they’d be force to change their strategy.
Subreddits doing this will have a much bigger impact than end users, because large masses of people will never do anything inconvenient on their own. This is the reason why capitalism doesn’t self-regulate for better environmental standards, for an example. The whole personal carbon footprint thing was invented by an oil company to shame individuals so we can blame eachother for our consumption instead of regulating energy companies. Nothing changes if we rely on everyone to do the right thing without any external motivations (be it environmental regulations or closing subreddits).
That’s not to say you shouldn’t also look at your own actions - personally I deleted Apollo on my phone and blocked the reddit domains on my work laptop and home network. But big players (I.e big subreddits) need to be part of the change.
This is a great video on the carbon footprint campaign:
It’s a shame promoting Lemmy isn’t part of the blackout
It’s been attempted in various spots, but either reddit itself removes the mentions or edits them out
Is that really something that’s been happening?
My comment just got downvoted, but it’s still there (and has reactions of other migratees to lemmy, so not invisible).
