Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual price,
  • Lvxferre
    5•2 months ago

    Let’s hope that the new bells and whistles* increase its resilience enough against Big Tech control over the internet. Otherwise we’ll get into a cyclical situation.

    *namely, federation and other anti-centralisation aspects of design.

    • @supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
      2•2 months ago

      The aspect that makes the fediverse and in particular reddit-likes uniquely adapted to growing in this harsh corporate hellscape has everything in my opinion to do with the critical early seed phase of communities.

      When you make a website with its own forum, you have huge friction to overcome with the network effect… but if you are plugging into a federated network than all of a sudden being a tiny community on lemmy with 2 or 3 people becomes an invitation to users passing by who already have an account to start a conversation and create that spark that will grow (slowly) into a real community.

      Consider the minimum viable population of users in a community, how many people does there need to be in a room before that warm feeling of a gathering sets in with comfortable conversation naturally occurring? For federated lemmy communities (and similar Reddit-likes) federation effectively lowers that number by a significant amount since it puts doors everywhere that people can spontaneously wander through and contribute small amounts to help kindle a spark and get the community going.

      This changes the paradigm of “social media platform metabolism” if you will, it facilitates much more organic early growth in communities.

      • Lvxferre
        1•2 months ago

        Yup - federated communities grow specially well in a corporate landscape. However my concern is if they’re able to stay dominant enough to prevent a cycle like:

        1. Corporate landscape.
        2. You got a few federated alternatives growing.
        3. Federations grow enough to become the main landscape.
        4. Corporations do something [I do not know what] better than federations.
        5. Corporates grow to the point of dwarfing the federations, into a corporate landscape.

        For example, it’s possible for me that corporations are specially able to exploit a federated landscape through EEE. I’m just conjecturing though.