Been thinking about this and want to know if it bugs anyone else.
It’s crazy to me that Twitter, Reddit and Facebook all cut off API access and people just went quiet on it. There was noise and complaints but no solutions. Usually when stuff like this gets locked down a counterculture shows up around it. Workarounds, open alternatives, people who make it their thing to keep it open. Like file sharing or ad blockers.
That didn’t really happen this time and I can’t figure out why. With all the propaganda and fake stuff out there right now, wouldn’t being able to see what’s spreading be important to understand? And isn’t them shutting it down a pretty large signal that it is important?
Maybe there’s a boring explanation I’m missing. But the part that gets me is the other possibility, that there’s some kind of suppression force we might not even be aware of.
Is that terrifying to anyone else or am I overthinking it? Just curious what people who were around for it think.
XMPP was the first to fall and most just accepted it. gTalk federation with Facebook? That was 2015~
Reddit just started a trial in my region where you can’t access it any more without logging in - well fuck them - app deleted, hello Lemmy 🙂
Hello there, grab a cookie!
99% of users on these platforms don’t even know what an API is.
People moved to Lemmy to build an open alternative. Everything you described as not happening is happening on Lemmy.
I don’t think there’s much of a counter culture here. Where is it? I see reddit just with smaller communities.
Are there communities of people discussing how to scrape Facebook or Twitter in order to collect analyze and disrupt?
The counterculture on Lemmy is to not use big tech. The culture here is regain control of our digital lives by using open source software and self hosted alternatives to big US technology. To be able to communicate without censorship, without eroding privacy, and without expectation of payment is the goal here. That is completely opposite of anything to do with Facebook or Twitter. Myself and others here don’t see any value with what’s on those platforms.
I’m not sure what you mean by collecting, analyzing, and disrupting. Can you give some examples of what could be accomplished?
First is the counterculture comment. I’ve thought alot about this and I think lemmy has done the opposite. You mentioned regaining control, censorship and payments which are all structure issues. But look at this place. What was actually created here? I’d argue it may even be worse then reddit.
The golden days of reddit and the internet existed for one reason, because they were everything you described. People had control. We had tools that let regular people create and post whatever they wanted, and also control the spaces we participated in. It was essentially a more socialized platform. But eventually reddit and the others wanted to make money, so they drifted toward removing those controls. YouTube removed the downvote button, then brought it back, but now it doesn’t do anything. It gives users the sense they’re doing something but its theater. Reddit and the others did the same. In the end everything was there to serve corporate interests.
Mods were given massive powers because it’s easy to appoint a producer or marketing team as a faceless mod who controls the space. That took away the communities freedom to grow organically. It also opened them up to political interests, like r/canada where a user became a mod, turned out to be a nazi and proceeded to only allow racists. That is exactly what lemmy recreated. It didn’t rebuild what reddit was in it’s best years. It rebuilt the features that allowed corporate control, censorship and the selling off of communities, and nobody questions this. Things are only good now because lemmy isn’t big enough yet. It’s a poison pill waiting to turn because we never addressed the original problems. We just found a new place.
So here’s what I think needs to change. Lemmy should reject mod control measures in favor of community based powers. Mods shouldn’t control communities. Control should be with the people in them, and mods should be there only to handle the most serious issues. Whatever power mods do keep should be transparent so everyone can see whats being removed and why.
Second, you didn’t know what I meant by collecting, analyzing and disrupting. I just mean learning.
My question back to you is this. Take anti vaccination groups, communities that defend rapists, or some of the most vile stuff online. Do you think those are just regular people showing up organically, or do you think there’s networks and information supply lines feeding each other?
I struggle to tell if other people see this the way I do. When you say you’re confused about why we would collect information, analyze it and disrupt things, it makes me think we’re living in two different worlds. It’s like trying to bring up vaccinations on Facebook.
I mean, there are some alternative frontends like Nitter, Invidious, Libreddit/Redlib and so on. You can install a browser addon called LibRedirect to see all known frontends at one place. Many of them having a hard time though, as platforms often attacking them, both technically and legally.
They’re all so big now, and the vast, vast majority of people posting to them do not care. They don’t know what an API is, they didn’t know there were third party apps to begin with, and the dismantling of all of that third party infrastructure happened in a totally different world to their own. That has left the “counter culture” having to decide between all of that content they’ve been binging for years, and that is still over there because they weren’t the ones making it, or having to do the work of building something new and empty.
And yet, there are still 10s of thousands of us here…
Why would anybody use these obvious tools of fascist billionaires in the first place? Cast it into the fire! Delete it!
Reddit is fucking terrible, a wasteland filled with bots, AI and loser mods on power trips, who happen to be also unpaid. I can’t wait for it to crash like digg did.
Cake day: June 12th, 2023
You did. I did. We’re here.
Lemmy launched in 2019, not 2023. I actually looked at it previously and there were like three servers with few communities or topics of discussion other than tankie and extreme-left politics. Now there are a bunch of servers, mostly run by level-headed people, and a bunch of communities about all sorts of topics.
The migration was smaller than I’d hoped, but it happened, and we should do our best to make sure it’s a welcoming place for the next wave.
There definitely seems to be a new wave that I’m a part of. I went to Tumblr from reddit in 2023 but it didn’t really stick. If I get tired of Lemmy I don’t know where I’d go at this point tbh, I’m hoping the federated layout means I can just sort of bounce from instance to instance if one grows stale.
bounce from instance to instance if one grows stale.
You usually don’t need to, because you can reach most communities from most instances.
You are literally posting on the platform built to fight back.
🤷♂️
The average user doesn’t know or care what API access is. The small percentage who do have moved to the alternatives we have today.
The people that did care did fight. The problem is that the people who cared enough to fight or take a stand are dwarfed by the people who don’t even know what an API is, and the companies ability to make huge money off the remaining companies that use the APIs.
In the world of capitalism your fighting back only matters if you hit their bottom line. Nothing the tech literate folks could do would make the math around Reddit and twitters API changes work in our favor.
It’s crazy to me that Twitter, Reddit and Facebook all cut off API access and people just went quiet on it. There was noise and complaints but no solutions. Usually when stuff like this gets locked down a counterculture shows up around it. Workarounds, open alternatives, people who make it their thing to keep it open. Like file sharing or ad blockers.
API access to a web app is controlled entirely at the server. There’s no external workaround that anyone could implement that would do anything. Any action that would be effective would require breaking into the corporate servers, which would be blatantly illegal and would also be found fairly quickly and fixed, so the risk would not be worth the reward. Anyone with the necessary skills and experience already knows this.
A lot of the people who could develop workarounds moved to Lemmy. We are the open alternative.
came to say this. I came during that upheval over here. Ironically not so much because of the api thing as much as I had found there was an alternative. I think I had seen things about mastadon before but I never liked the twitter thing so it did not appeal. When I found out there was an open source and not centralized control forum experience like this I was jazzed.
I feel like everyone who cared about reddit closing its API, is here. (I know that’s why I moved here and haven’t been back since.) I stopped using Twitter around the time they started charging more, but Elon kinda killed what was left anyway. I left facebook 10+yrs ago at this point, so I don’t know about their API.
Honestly though, API’s aren’t that big of a deal to 99.9% of people.
