The strange thing to me is how everybody keeps trying to make distributed Twitter happen when distributed Reddit is the low hanging fruit for federated social media.

You don't want to end up banned from a movies forum because you also participate in a political forum. Federation solves that problem because you can use separate accounts without either forum knowing that you also use the other.

This exists with Lemmy already and is fostering nice communities (and due to ActivityPub is interoperable with Mastodon accounts)

I like it principle, but after watching the situation with Twitter clones, I'm not too optimistic on federated services taking off.

I would like to see a wikipedia-style system for Twitter/Reddit: open access data, non-profit.

Is this not just what the internet was before reddit? What features would "distributed reddit" have that an internet full of independent community forums be missing?

They had this years ago, and they were called "forums."

>The strange thing to me is how everybody keeps trying to make distributed Twitter happen when distributed Reddit is the low hanging fruit for federated social media.

Honestly, it's strange to me how hard people are trying to make distributed anything happen. Federation mostly solves a problem that real people don't have or care about.

>Honestly, it's strange to me how hard people are trying to make distributed anything happen.

IMO, something federation is very good at is solving one slow-moving problem - enshittification of social platforms. It's not immune, of course, but an Elon Musk-style takeover is much harder with Mastodon than Twitter, and it would be hard to run it into the ground in other ways because the platforms are owned by different people and groups.

It's not possible because the most common problems with running a forum are spam and moderation, and both of those are too much work unless it's centralized.

The network effects are too strong.

Remember, the only reason Reddit "won" was because Digg destroyed itself with a radical upgrade that everyone hated.

Reddit would have to do something similarly self-inflicted, and I can't even guess where people would go. Reddit was already an alternative to Digg -- what's the alternative to Reddit? I mean, it's certainly not Quora.

There is Lemmy for example, very similar to old Reddit. The big problem is the missing content outside of mainstream communities.

> The big problem is the missing content outside of mainstream communities.

Have you looked at AI bots to help populate Lemmy with more content?

No, because people don't come to Lemmy to read AI-generated posts. It's called social media, not robot time with language models.

there are plenty of reddits outside of the "popular ones" that have invaluable information in one place and I can ask questions. It still has value for me, and not much value for axis of evil bots to spread political disinformation like popular subs and on twitter.

Why would anyone want to purposely read AI bot content?

It was already dead by then. Really, it was the various Slashdot exoduses... sites like K5 got large initial boosts, but stumbled and started to deteriorate. If the Digg exodus is what sent you to Slashdot, chances are you're the kind of user everyone else was trying to escape.

>what's the alternative to Reddit? I mean, it's certainly not Quora.

If it was deliberate I certainly can't tell, but one of the characteristics of Reddit is that it caused so many other little tiny internet forums to just wither away. Most were visually unappealing, running some ancient phpbb software or whatever, but there were so many like stars in the night sky. Now, if they're even still running, you look for the newest post, and it will say "November 2023". Hell, the only reason they are still running is that the credit card number on file paying for hosting doesn't expire until next year somehow. Reddit is a red tide algae choking out all life in the ocean, nothing else gets to exist anymore.

I think you might be onto something with the observation about people moving from old forum software like phpbb to subreddits.

It's like what happened to personal websites when things like Blogger, Tumblr and Facebook popped up.

It's hard to beat something that is easy to set up and pays for hosting but still let's you control moderation. It's a no brainer.

Managing your own domain where users post content is a minefield of problems these days even if you didn't mind the cost of running it.

Something like this might also explain the move to things like Discord over IRC.

Reddit is quietly a huge website with a significant amount of users. So many people use it but dont talk about it. Google search says 1billion mau? Twice as big as Twitter

>Reddit was already an alternative to Digg -- what's the alternative to Reddit?

This site is essentially 'orange reddit', they just need to add sub-HNs or tagging or something and it'd be ready for an influx of reddit refugees. Not that any of really want it, but it's possible.

I don't think this is true.

The main thing I see Reddit being useful for are discussions about entertainment.

There's probably a subreddit for your favorite sports team, twitch steamer, TV show, book series video game, politics (which is entertainment for some people).

Reddit has seriously degraded the experience of a lot of these communities with things like restricting custom CSS.

It seems to me that the way you'd disrupt Reddit as a startup is to pick a vertical and laser focus on becoming the best discussion board for that community. If it's sports than have integrations for live stats, scores, etc.

In general you could attract users by offering profit sharing on ads the same way Youtube does for creators.

Have the best moderation tools in the world, a constant painpoint with Reddit. Give admins more flexibility over the appearance of the board, all things Reddit took away.

The other path for disruption would be if an established company with those communities tackled the problem. Lots of communities already us Discord, but they tend to also have a subreddit because chat and forums are different communication methods. Discord could easily offer a forum product as an extension of their chat services. If they do it well they'd drive a lot of users away from the subreddits.

Very few of the reddit users who are providing the content for free are motivated by which search engines are allowed to index the content, so I don't see how this would make it more ripe for competition. (If you just mean society would now be even better off if reddit were disrupted, ok, maybe, but that's a different thing.)

Or for Google to buy it.

They could monetize it much better while being less annoying.

Ultimately - Google is getting everything they want from Reddit with this deal without having to buy it outright.

Short of Reddit transforming to an entirely different product (difficult) - I'm not sure where the major growth opportunity is for it.

It wouldn't be the first time they have done something like this either. Remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups ?

>Remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups

It'd be somewhat hilarious if google bought reddit just to archive it and shut it down.

Man, I just want to be able to search the entire internet for when I’m doing niche research.

Does this mean there will be a future where everyone is running their own crawler? I suppose.

Networks effects are more powerful than we are. Witness the number of people who despise Xhitter but are still on there. Once something has a sufficient network effect they become immune to normal market forces and able to abuse their position with near impunity.

The killing of third party clients didn't have significant impact, I don't know what would they have to do to lose users, other than some kind of mandatory subscription fee.