this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023

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Reddit down amid major protest (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

141 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Reddit has stopped working for millions of users around the world.

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/reddit-down-subreddits-protest-not-working-b2356013.html

The mass outage comes amid a major boycott from thousands of the site’s administrators, who are protessting new changes to the platform.

On 12 June, popular sub-Reddits like r/videos and r/bestof went dark in retaliation to proposed API (Application Programming Interface) charges for third-party app developers.

Among the apps impacted by the new pricing is popular iOS app Apollo, which announced last week that it was unable to afford the new costs and would be shutting down.

Apollo CEO Christian Selig claimed that Reddit would charge up to $20 million per year in order to operate, prompting the mass protest from Reddit communities.

In a Q&A session on Reddit on Friday, the site’s CEO Steve Huffman defended the new pricing.

“Some apps such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync have decided this pricing doesn’t work for their businesses and will close before pricing goes into effect,” said Mr Huffman, who goes by the Reddit username u/spez.

“For the other apps, we will continue talking. We acknowledge that the timeline we gave was tight; we are happy to engage with folks who want to work with us.”

In response to the latest outage, one Reddit user wrote on Twitter: “Spez, YOU broke Reddit.”

Website health monitor DownDetector registered more than 7,000 outage reports for Reddit on Monday.

Some users were greeted with the message: “Something went wrong. Just don’t panic.”

Others received an error warning that stated: “Our CDN [content delivery network] was unable to reach our servers.”

Update: Seems to be resolved for most users

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[–] [email protected] 74 points 2 years ago

Best thing I read so far about this:

The official Reddit API goes dark in solidarity with current protests.

[–] [email protected] 55 points 2 years ago (8 children)

Beehaw is getting hammered with traffic and is really slow today. I wonder if there's been a mass exodus to Lemmy...

[–] [email protected] 45 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I just joined lemmy today. I like it so far. A little rough around the edges, but seems to have potential.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Think of the “Lemmyverse” as the ground floor in relation to your Reddit experiences. Like a new MMO when comparing with the maturity of WoW. Some things will feel a little awkward for not having the polish, but there are other mechanics that are new and engaging. The more people who engage on Lemmy, Beehaw, et. al., and the longer the engagement, the better the experience will get. I think of it more like a diamond in the rough, instead of it being a “lesser” version of Reddit.

The difference here is that your investment (of your time) can’t be undercut by a greedy CEO. A fediverse is “self healing.” It’s like setting up a mesh - one node could go bad but the network itself will survive.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 years ago (18 children)

This is why I'm hoping Lemmy can resist against some of the Reddit-specific culture that I think would dampen the experience here. Animosity towards emojis, creating echo-chamber communities/subreddits, the air of smug self-righteousness, discussion as something one can 'win' etc.

Redditors in general aren't bad, but a lot of vocal users had it in their heads that they were somehow better than people who used other platforms, and staked lines to maintain that cultural divide. Some of them concluded they were better than other redditors; turning communities into Us vs Them tribalism, until they would fracture into r/subreddit and r/truesubreddit.

Lemmy is not Reddit. It had a culture and it had users before the API shuffle; it's an opportunity to start fresh. It's not appropriate to expect Lemmy turn into Reddit, with all the unpleasantness that entails, and at the expense of the lemmings that were already here.

I'm quite honest about it; I spent years on Reddit too. I'm a redditor. But being here on Lemmy has been such a wonderful breath of fresh air, the 'I disagree but I'll respectfully explain why' that Reddit was missing for years. I can feel how miserable modern Reddit is in comparison and I really hope we don't recreate it.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's a bit hard to subscribe to different instances if you're on a separate server etc. I hope it gets easier. Once you're subscribed though, it feels like reddit pretty much. Just hope the saints that post content start using Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah, it is a bit of a challenge. What I did was go to here: https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/4331 and find a community that I had as a subreddit. In the upper right corner, there is a blue dialog box and at the bottom there is an identifier. You copy that identifier, then go to your home server, go to search and paste that identifier. One of the search results should be that server, and you can then just hit “subscribe.”

It’s the same with Mastodon.

That said, if your server shows a listing of Communities, you might be able to subscribe from that list. Beehaw offers that.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 years ago (7 children)

I'll admit, I'm part of that exodus.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Beehaw is getting hammered with traffic and is really slow today.

They've really turned it around over the past few hours though. Fast as hell now.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago

I've been watching the stats since the blackout announcement. According to the Lemmy page on the federation info stats site, Lemmy gained about 10,000 users just last night.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Hello I am a reddit refugee. And I am happy to find open source alternatives to things I use. Thanks to all the devs here!!!

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

I’ve tried 10ish alts today… Lemmy so far has my vote for best alt, others probably feel the same

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 2 years ago (8 children)

It's such a shame - I used Reddit for many years and found so many helpful people that helped me with many things - fixing my motorbike, improving my 3D prints or saving my plants. I hope we can establish similar kind of community in the Fediverse.

I guess that's what we get for trusting too much in a company - decentralised open source software is way to go. Even if somebody in this particular instance will go fucking insane and will decide to raise it to the ground, whatever, the project lives on and you can just go somewhere else.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That's the thing this last week has made me realize: it's so unjust that the 'owners' of Reddit are completely unable to see that the only value they have is what the community provides. Their sense of entitlement, when it is us who are responsible for their $X hundred-million valuation is startling.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

No they see it, and I can see how they have to make money to support their operations. Lemmy will have similar problems and we will have to pitch in. Bu that's fine, let's talk and let's figure something out. You don't just shut the door and command people to pay up.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

That's the point I'm making. I would have been 100% behind justified pricing changes to maintain the site. But like you said, that's never what that was.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

So much this! Luckily i got the ins and outs of tuning and fixing a 3d printer. Got my car fixed, helped others fix theirs. Learned how to lose a couple of pounds, got motivated to run, and take care of my plants!

Decentralized systems for the win! Resonates with me soooo much!!!

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (7 children)

I'm curious about why the most popular subreddits going private would stress out their servers. Wouldn't that reduce load?

They might be getting DDoSed.

Another possibility is that many of the closed subreddits link to a single thread in Save3rdpartyapps for an explanation. That page was returning gateway timeouts over the last few days. Since it has tens of thousands of comments, the sorting algorithm might be timing out from people visiting that particular page.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I think the servers don't know what to do when ads outnumber content 36 to 1

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

They celebrate, of course

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Can't have a black out if the site is not online points to temple

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

Double blackout

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 years ago (2 children)

"What we had today wasn't a complete drop in traffic, engagement, and a resulting significant downturn in the number of served ads, caused by the major boycott we're in the middle of, guys, that was just a major outage. We still have great expectations for the IPO."

-- spez, probably

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

How do you short a stock that isn't public yet? Asking for a friend.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Slowly tweaking his nipples as he says it

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Makes me wonder if it's on purpose to hide the blackout...

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

That or rushing through untested changes to minimise its visibility, leading to site breakage.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago

I'm still incredibly surprised that by taking closing communities you get your servers down. Usually it should be the other way around, but god dammit they screwed that infra somehow, somewhere.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago (4 children)

I wonder what is going to happen on Lemmy when we don't have reddit stories to rant about

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (2 children)

It'll normalize a bit and you'll start seeing more diverse content. Some will quit reddit cold turkey, some will do what i do and hop back and forth, some will just go back and deal. I like it here though so im sticking around at least

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago

this is the "and find out" stage

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I burned down Memes of the dank and I moved here. Best thing that I did

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The blackout is pretty dang short though, inconsequential I reckon

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Not all subreddits are following the 2 day blackout rule. Some have gone private indefinitely and others are going dark until they think matters are being addressed reasonably.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (7 children)

I wonder if this is coincidental, or if some people are taking it upon themselves to DDoS them or something. I hope it is the former as that would be absolutely hilarious, and can't be used as further justification for their continuing BS.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago (3 children)

So. One thing I've noticed is that privated subs on mobile return an error (403 forbidden). I can't help but wonder if they have a crush of mobile users hammering the API over and trying to refresh their favorite sub because they can't see the message explaining that it's been privated.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

Hahaha what a bunch of incompetent boobs making decisions over there leading Reddit as a company

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

Reddit has entered the "Fuck round and find out" portion of their journey.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

Oh no 😱

Anyway.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (7 children)

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Seems that the past couple of days some subreddits have been removing links that suggest migration to any alternatives such as Lemmy, Kbin and Mastadon. Hopefully the exodus continues!!!!

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

"We're offline working to restore access to subreddits that went private for some reason" - Reddit, probably later today

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