People don't realize that Reddit *used* to be open source. https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
Another thing people find surprising:
Self-hosted Reddit servers used to be commonplace.
Now imagine if ActivityPub existed when Reddit was open source.
Well, we don't have to imagine it. There's Lemmy.
But my point is that every self-hosted Reddit install could have been federated if ActivityPub existed back then.
Of course, even if Reddit was still open source and supported ActivityPub, I'd probably prefer Lemmy since they use an AGPL license.
@atomicpoet Do you also like microblog.pub? I believe it is modular and easy to manage.
@house I haven't tried it.
I completely forgot that #Reddit was #FOSS! And in fact I think that old code, or a fork of it, is still used to host forums to this day.
Imagine if somebody forked it to support #ActivityPub…
Granted IMHO all #Fediverse forum platforms are going about this all wrong; instead of modelling their platforms after #Reddit, servers should be structured as communities in their own right. i.e. instead of a #Lemmy instance with communities for #Politics, #Gaming, Tech, #Sports etc., there should be a #politics instance, a #sports instance, etc. That might be hard to implement though.
@atomicpoet you could take the slashdot source and do the same. Or Scoop! Talk about ancient.
But the question is: why?
@ParanoidFactoid Why federate?
@atomicpoet but that ignores the question and just punts it over to the next guy. My point about asking why is that it's a question techies almost never ask. Because the nerd-o-sphere believes there is a technical solution to every human problem. A utopian idea going back to the 80s. See: MIT AI lab. And CMU.
This Whole Net Catalog stuff has roots in 60s idealism but came to fruition in the 2010s and turned out to be dystopian.
@ParanoidFactoid What I want to know is "What exactly are you asking?"
Because I'm currently not sure.
@atomicpoet Why?
Why would the owners of media monopolies ever federate? It isn't in their best interest.
Why should federated sites use moderation tools designed by for profits to curate to the whims of advertisers and owners' political goals?
What problem do you wish to solve and how will the tools you propose not make things worse?
Because they sure made it worse at Reddit.
@ParanoidFactoid Well, yeah. I agree that media monopolies would prefer never to federate. I've said many times previously, and I talk about that a lot.
Anyway, my point isn't to say, "Let's emulate Reddit!" -- just that this existed, imagine if it was also federated.
Hope that clarifies things.
Take care!
@atomicpoet hey, you got some relevant and useful counter-commentary in here and I'd encourage you to reread it sometime.
I don't want to change your mind or argue to prove you wrong. And I still want to follow you because you say interesting things.
So, nothing personal. And it's the idea under discussion, not you or me.
Thanks for posting.
@atomicpoet lemmy? what's that? googling doesn't help much here, maybe it's obscure or something.
@atomicpoet how did I never know this?
@atomicpoet If Reddit was a self-hosted service back then, then what is the reason for reddit to stop the self-hosted version of it?
I've been looking for this answer on Google and doesn't find the right web to explain it.
@novalkomik Here's an article. https://fossbytes.com/reddit-open-source-code-closed-reason/
The only major extant server based on the old Reddit source code, to my knowledge, is called "Saidit" (how original...) and is basically a den for all the subreddits that got banned from Reddit proper, so take a quick guess on what kind of content does it have