This is the best most comprehensive article written on this subject. And there is a link to every other article. As usual EFF does their homework and applies their judgement to describe perfectly:

The heart of this fight is for what Reddit’s CEO calls their “valuable corpus of data,” i.e. the user-made content on the company’s servers, and for who gets live off this digital commons. While Reddit provides essential infrastructural support, these community developers and moderators make the site worth visiting, and any worthwhile content is the fruit of their volunteer labor. It’s this labor and worker solidarity which gives users unique leverage over the platform, in contrast to past backlash to other platforms.

If i may dream, the actual solution to this issue would be a mod/user takeover along the lines of a factory occupation, or a more peaceful worker buyout. (Sometimes the former leads to the latter.)

When the tools of production are a server farm, how do they get taken over? What does it look like?

To be a little more grounded, the real targets of this action should not be "reddit" or /u/spez. It should be whoever is actually in charge. Do we know who that is?

honestly I never had much use for the general communities like "technology", "news", "sex", etc. I came to reddit and stuck around for the niche stuff. Even niches that I am not involved in, it is fun to see what people care about and get a different perspective. And sometimes it's a life saver to be able to access specialized communities. Holla at /r/pestcontrol, /r/bedbugs, /r/whatisthisbug and the related subs.

I can understand from an admin perspective of a specific instance why you'd want to keep a lid on things during a time of crazy growth. In terms of lemmy as a platform, having small communities that can develop shared norms and knowledge is what will make it worthwhile and avoid the general feeling of being "over run" with low quality content. the big tent groups will always be lowest common denominator. Also the general topics do not want to get full of a specific kind of common but boring post. Like /r/apple (IIRC) didn't allow tech support type question; there is a separate space for that.

In your position I would consider making a "new group request" section where people can post their ideas and others can express interest. You could request for people to do a bit of work such as writing up community guidelines to show some effort. When a group is rejected by this instance and they form somewhere else; in most cases you could allow them to link to that (unless it is you know terrible) so it can be found by others in the future. I understand that would entail a whole lot of work and headaches to run and people will be mad about it but over time it could shake out to allow actually communties.

I do not know much details about the internal power structures of a company like reddit, but it seems like this guy seems to be a real liability at the moment. I wonder why he is being allowed to go around doing this.

Maybe they are giving him enough rope to hang himself so he can be removed from his position in a few days. Firing a disliked manager is a common union busting tactic. If he can be made into the centre of gravity for all the ire, canning him and making some small backtrack could have a lot of people reconsidering leaving reddit.

Or maybe there truly is no plan....

I think its interesting that most regular people even who describe themselves as socially or fiscally conservative, when it comes to very specific situations/policies, favour more "progressive" actions and outcomes.

As a person who has come and gone as a casual linux user a few times i have had multiple chances to experience being a new user. I have used mainsream distros and niche distros.

Agree popularity is the #1 factor to consider. You need help to get you over the first humps and having a huge existing archive of other people working through issues on forums, tutorials, etc is gold. And innumerable channels to pose questions if you need personal help.

Your first linux install is like your first date. You will probably not marry and spend the rest of your life together. No need to agonize over it passing notes and getting your fortune told. Just go for it and move on.

I think you should add that the arch docs excellent regardless of what distro you use and are beginer friendly because i actually avoided them for a while assuming theyd be written in 1337 speak and only complicated arch stuff.

Also I will add that the posts which do not directly related to the blackout are all 6-12 hours old.

mastodon has some portability features but not the ability to fully move the content of your account: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/ though you can move some stuff like friend lists etc.

I thought that was quite an escalation also. But maybe their health & safety committee reccomended it. Probably just trying to make the workers feel embattled and unsafe so they would avoid engaging with the issues and stay to reddits side. Its a PUA kind of doublespeak; spez is the one actually making the threat. But in a way it seems to come from us.

To be a fly on the wall at the water cooler. Please reddit workers, leak a zoom call.

I have tried to explain AH to people who don't use reddit.

Main problem is it literally sounds too good to be true. I think I come off as totally naive believing this BS line I've been fed about all these "historians" running a subreddit spending all their time thoughtfully constructed, non crackpot answers.

Sounds totally fake. Like how dumb do you have to be to get fooled by a forum on reddit?

so a new community can hit the ground running with the thousands of posts of advice, problem solving, experiences, that made the old one valuable.

Its not like email because when you open your email you dont accidentally wander into another email server where the only way to reply is by copy and pasting a nonobvious code and searching through an interface that isnt identified and doesnt work.

Email server were totally invisible to users and i wish everyone would stop bsing to the contrary. It is a backend conparison not of utility to end users.

until they would fracture into r/subreddit and r/truesubreddit.

You know, as a person who has never been in a "true" subreddit or a cj sub or a meme sub, I really do not mind those who wish to be so. They are doing their own thing. They have their own norms and expectations and that is where they go to be comfortable. So what?

And do you really think100% of those people literally only went to those subs and never contributed anywhere else? Nah, they were on the needlework sub posting their stitches or posting pictures of clouds or whatever.

We do not all have to be in one big group... I do not understand this fantasy. It is really OK to have different venues for different ideas and ways of being; that is one of the magics of online life in fact. It is possible to have little weird niches, even of smugness. One of the joys in life, which is dripping from the above comment and countless others I have been reading here. :D

me too "you broke reddit"

everybody who ever had an account refreshing to see what will happen lol

Is there a way to see what subs re dark out of the actual total? This looks like it is what % are dark compared to what % are restricted?

In other words I confused what the n is on all of these

I mean if we want people to migrate to lemmy, the thing to do would be to just start cloning all the subreddits... "Hey everyone you can pick up where you left off."

but I can't stress enough how a massive chunk of the internet these days relies on Amazon Web Services to get online, and I could say likewise for Microsoft or Google. I'd swear off their services if I could and embrace a hardline FOSS stance, but if I went through with that, a lot of my employment opportunities wouldn't consider me.

I assume you mean because you work in tech and these are the tools of the trade.. but who in the world doing anything can actually avoid these? Try setting up a firewall that fully blocks them and try to use the internet. Nobody can avoid the services run by people with the most reprehensible ideas who have the means to put the into action, and do.

Interesting questions... well they would have to pick a protocol(s) and implement them. They would have to comply with the mechanics and the licenses.

For example here is the ActivityPub rec. Given how non interested reddit seems to be in developing... anything... that is not directly $$$-oriented it's hard to imagine them doing all this. But if they for some reason decided to make a take over of the fediverse and put their back into it? It would be a totally different reddit and I can't imagine it.

I have seen all this stuff about "migrating to lemmy" so here I am. But what you'd really need to do isn't just tell everyone to go make a new account, but mirror all the existing content for communities. That's what differentiates "migrating" from "making a new account". Is this possible? Planned? Contemplated?

I tried to make it clear but just in case I didn't manage to, this is a cross post of someone else's post on kbin. I personally do not know anything about this but I thought it would be of interest. Maybe someone else will have some insight but if you click the post you can see the original with lots of comments.