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.
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.
You usually don’t need to, because you can reach most communities from most instances.