Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely
I was really skeptical of lemmy [1] when I first heard about it during the blackout. I joined yesterday and it completely changed my mind. Yes, it is going to face some growing pains (see the total user growth in the past few days) [2] in the coming weeks and months but it really has the potential to replace Reddit with a federated system of communities. One that won&#x27;t be damaged by investors or executives attempting to pivot over to the latest social media trend.<p>As many people have recently noted, Reddit quietly became an extremely important repository of text-based knowledge. Distinct from Wikipedia and Archive.org, but no less important, Reddit is full of valuable procedural (how-to) and consumer (product-related) knowledge. Reddit has countless small communities built around hobbies and other niche interests, which places it in the same role once fulfilled by Usenet and later independent web-based forums.<p>While those technologies still exist, they face enormous challenges with discovery (try to find a new forum on Google recently?), single-sign-on, and moderation. These were all solved by Reddit and I believe lemmy solves them too. The fediverse [3] truly has the potential to liberate small internet communities from the vagaries of Big Social Media, of which Reddit is only the latest example.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;join-lemmy.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;join-lemmy.org</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;the-federation.info&#x2F;platform&#x2F;73" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;the-federation.info&#x2F;platform&#x2F;73</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fediverse" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fediverse</a>