Remind me, who owns WhatsApp?

I’m reading this as a play to allow communities to have their own paid for areas and Reddit takes a cut in exchange for hosting this.

I recall a while back they were looking at a way to financially compensate major contributors and moderators, so possibly this idea is being revisited in a way.

Right now though, most people contribute to communities to share their knowledge or creativity and to connect with others- and monetisation might be there in the background but isn’t a first class feature of the platform. It makes business sense to make this play, even though it’ll make the site worse.

To conclude: Reddit becomes an only fans competitor. Calling it now.

Passkeys (depending on implementation) are more resistant to info stealer viruses.

The private key portion can be in your OS’s credential store and can be used to sign the challenge without being revealed to the calling application.

Of course this doesn’t work if you got rooted, but a lot of viruses of this kind try to steal what they can get as a regular user, and you can get a lot, ie AWS credentials, saved browser passwords etc.

In my view it’s cheap defense in depth.

Well I had hoped, naiively that Reddit would respect the developer community that had helped make their website so popular. A community of developers provided apps and services for them for the simple price of a free API. I thought the APIpocolypse might happen, but I thought reddit was special somehow and they would see how beautiful and vibrant that community was and not damage it for fear of damaging the soul of the website. Yeah, that was pretty fucking naiive.

Ah well, I’ll put my energy into Lemmy and Fediverse projects instead.

I don’t know what happened but in the last half hour the website has become highly responsive again. Thank you admins for your hard work.

Look at the top right of my screenshot, you will see some extra icons. I’m sorry, I should have included the URL: https://lemmy.ml/post/1212570?scrollToComments=true

I was logged in under this same account as I was browsing.

I just mentioned Dynamo as an idea without thinking about it too much.

Dynamo works well for one and two dimensional data structures but for more complex things you probably want a regular database. I expect it could be done efficiently but not at a good cost and without tons of technical difficulty.

Yes, looking at the docs linked from a sibling comment I see that upvotes and downvotes are part of the protocol, which is good to see. To prevent vote stuffing however, it does seem that all instances will have a database of upvotes and downvotes and who did them. They were never really secret anyway but it’s interesting that any server can see this, it’ll be an interesting development to be able to track vote brigading.

Furthermore friends, please sort by new where possible to help give new posts visibility when you interact with them.

It is definitely slower than usual. It’s not just you. The site is clearly under very heavy load.

I think probably a pluggable storage backend is the best move. For example, any cloud hosted instance could use a native document storage format such as dynamodb, which is often quite cheap or free for small use-cases.

Apologies, this was meant to be in response to a comment concerned about Rust security. I’m still getting used to Mlem.

Major companies are now using Rust, such as Microsoft. I don’t think there’s any chance they haven’t reviewed it and are not crawling over the codebase on a regular basis.

Do upvotes and downvotes federate similarly? If so, how does the protocol prevent vote rigging?

More people = more problems I am certain but this is a social network and without people it will fail. We must all make an effort to be the change that we want to see in the world.

I don’t foresee a problem in the immediate future aside from higher server load, but in terms of culture, only people who believe in a new social network will be willing to join.

In 5 years however when this is a great place to be, a large number of people will join who don’t respect the legacy. The departure from Digg to Reddit felt like this too, I hope that the federation aspect will ensure this is longer lived.

Because if you can just communicate around a walled garden, what’s the point or value in staying in one?

Because people are happy with that garden and don’t think about others. Please remember that your average internet user doesn’t really know what an API is, or understand about open standards, they just want to find some content that matches their interests, upvote and share said content with their friends who are also inside that garden.

This average user isn’t a bad person, stupid or naiive, they just have other things going on in their lives and the internet is a small part of it. They use it, take what they want from it and move on, and there are so many more of those people than you.

People who switch from iOS to Android report losing friends who were on iMessage and are unwilling to move to something platform agnostic such as Signal or WhatsApp. I wouldn’t underestimate the walled garden effect.

As a migrant from Digg to Reddit back in the paleolithic era, I would have said the same of Reddit, the UI really wasn’t good compared to Digg. People got used to it in time.

I also remember a time when it wasn’t clear if people would want to shop online, and a debate about whether email could really replace letters, or if people would find it too complicated.

People will come to the fediverse if we give them a reason to.

How does that differ to Twitter or Reddit?