Simple question: Will you go back to Reddit and other centralized social media platforms, if Reddit step back from the API changes? The benefits of Reddit are obvisiouly, it has million of users and even small communitys have thousands of users.
For me it's pretty clear, after deleting my Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Discord accounts, the decentraliced Fediverse is my future in social media. Even with an very much smaller community, i'm not willing to be treated as ad-cow for the big corps.
But what do you think about your future in social media? Fediverse or Reddit, Meta, Google and all the others? Or will you go safe and use both, to have an backup option?
(Image by Alan Frijns from Pixabay)
A quick story.
I play Dungeons and Dragons. Wizards of the Coast (WotC which owns D&D and is in turn owned by Hasbro) tried to pull some evil things with the license that covers a lot of D&D content and tehre was a huge backlash and boycott and WotC eventually (mostly) backed down.
I took part in the boycott and when WotC backed down, I reasoned that the boycott would be for naught if I didn't end my boycott and "reward" WotC for (mostly) agreeing to play nice(r). So I ended my boycott.
Just a few weeks later, WotC sent armed mercinaries (literally the Pinkertons) after one of their Magic The Gathering customers over a purchase mixup on the reseller's part. No calling and nicely asking the customer to voluntarily help resolve what WotC saw as an issue. Just Pinkertons at the customer's door one day.
I've now learned the lesson I should have already known ahead of the D&D licensing debacle. What Reddit is doing now shows their true nature. If folks end the boycott and go back to Reddit, that will only empower Reddit and its parent company Conde Nast to pull something just as bad or worse in the future. (Not that they won't do something worse even if people don't come back.) And when that happens, the Reddit users who came back to Reddit after this API pricing situation settled down will be tired and more reticent to engage in another boycott.
So my philosophy is "if it's bad enough to warrant a temporary boycott, it's bad enough to warrant a permanent boycott."