this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration

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### About Community Tracking and helping #redditmigration to Kbin and the Fediverse. Say hello to the decentralized and open future. To see latest reeddit blackout info, see here: https://reddark.untone.uk/

founded 1 year ago
 

As with many other subreddits, /r/LegalAdviceUK (which had been dark since the start of the blackout) has been sent a thinly-veiled threat by Reddit.

So they've reopened in order to start moving the entire community of 810,000 subscribers to somewhere else.

As you can imagine there are a number of legal professionals who moderate that sub, and they really don't take kindly to being threatened. They sign off their reopening message with "Fuck /u/Spez and long live John Oliver." but for the real fun you might want to look up a very famous British legal case they reference, Arkell v Pressdram 1971.

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[–] Litigant-In-Person@kbin.social 114 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

Hello, mod here. I am glad you enjoyed our post. It felt appropriate.

Comments were also made to the admins in modmail directly too.

vows to move the entire community off Reddit

Regarding migration, we are obviously open to different options., though perhaps "vowing" is a bit strong.

We have also made https://kbin.social/m/legal/ and https://feddit.uk/c/legaladviceuk (edit: also https://feddit.uk/c/legaladvice)

These are not active yet, and they might never be, but they are options we are looking at.

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Obviously I'm biased and would love to see the subreddit end up in the fediverse, but I'm glad you guys are taking your time and trying to figure out what medium and what platform is the best fit for what y'all do.

If legaladvice is available on feddit.uk, you should try to snag that, too. As a UK-based (or focused -- I know servers are often hosted in other countries than the users they serve) instance, the UK is already in the domain. Though, I also get why you might want it right there in the community handle directly, given how which website a given community is hosted on is not always crystal clear in the current site designs.

[–] Litigant-In-Person@kbin.social 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just grabbed https://feddit.uk/c/legaladvice too, thanks for the comment/suggestion.

I am cautious of taking ownership too much, as we might not end up using them and wouldn't want to domain-squat, so in theory I would be open to letting other people take control or decide to moderate them if they felt they were fully invested.

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You can always ask the admin to purge the communities if you end up not using them. That will release the name for others to pick up.

That is very good to know too!

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[–] static@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You do know that you can visit kbin from lemmy, and lemmy from kbin? You don't have to choose 1 of the 2.

[–] Litigant-In-Person@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Had no idea what-so-ever :)

[–] static@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I subscribed to the lemmy, it's here : https://kbin.social/m/legaladviceuk@feddit.uk
With how federation works only new posts from now on will be synchronised, not the history.

[–] Litigant-In-Person@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Christ, we're gonna have to learn how a whole infrastructure set up works.

[–] Sam_uk@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago

@Litigant-In-Person@kbin.social

Yeah, but it's not that consequential whether you choose a good Lemmy instance or a good Kbin instance.

As a Kbin Stan I prefer this interface, the community is new, without some of the Tankie baggage/ perception of Lemmy.

@losttourist @static

[–] static@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago

syncing to other lemmy's and kbins is not that big of a problem if you're popular, the first subscriber from an instance will be quick
you mod everything on the main instance.

[–] LollerCorleone@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

On top of the other replies, here is a short and simple video explaining the basic concept behind the fediverse (which is the umbrella term used to describe the network which Lemmy and kbin instances are part of)

https://framatube.org/w/9dRFC6Ya11NCVeYKn8ZhiD?start=1m37s

PS: The link above is to a Peertube instance, which is the fediverse alternative for YouTube.

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[–] jherazob@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lemmy and Kbin are hopefully gonna grow and become better than Reddit has ever been, but they're not there yet and will be a while before it happens. Specifically, moderation tools in both platforms are reportedly weak at the moment, with a long list of features yet to be implemented. So while i do want the so-called Threadiverse growing, if you're in a moderating hotspot as your post mentions, you might wanna consider this detail and check if the current tools as present are good enough or not, it might be enough for your needs with what exists already but frankly the subs I've modded have been tiny and i don't have the mental model to tell you if they are already.

I too urge you to not choose Discord for this community for all the reasons stated. Plus it's the wrong tool for the job, it's "chat", not "forums", it's by it's nature impermanent and for ephemeral conversation. Hell, a good old forum will be miles better than Discord for this.

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[–] NotMyOldRedditName@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You should do a poll like pics and say should we only allow posts not requesting legal advice and any replies to questions to indicate it would be inappropriate to provide legal advice on reddit. Any legal advice will be removed.

[–] Litigant-In-Person@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

Nah. The mods spoke about it, but broadly they just care too much about the people that need the subreddit.

[–] Death2lois@lemmy.one 7 points 1 year ago
[–] athos77@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

Hello, LAUK mod! Thank you for all the good help you've given people over the years.

whilst excitedly looking to treat you like Elon treated 6,500 twitter employees.

I don't know if it's been forgotten in all the confusion, but two weeks ago, reddit since that they were laying off about 90 staff / 5% of their workforce, and restructuring some of the rest [ https://www.axios.com/pro/media-deals/2023/06/07/reddit-layoffs-hiring-ipo ]. And now, if course, in addition to the layoff/restructuring issues, in addition to the absolute insanity caused by reddit's stubborn reaction to the very people who populate and moderate 99% of the data on their site, their workers are also more having to deal with Huffman breathing down their necks, insisting that it's absolutely vital that they deliver a fully-functioning set of mod tools on the 1st - tools that they've repeatedly refused to even really look at for over a decade. [I expect a shit show.]

But anyway, just wanted to point out that the reddit layoffs are already starting.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

Federated link to the UK one.

Federated link to the generic one.

Federated link to the Kbin one

You might want to remove your links and edit these ones in, as they currently won't work in a confusing way. There's still a lot of rough edges on the Fediverse.

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[–] skip0110@lemm.ee 107 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Mirror: https://teddit.adminforge.de/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/14cr5zc/were_back_and_heres_whats_happening/

Awesome! My favorite bit.

Reddit is both stating the protests are having no or minimal effect, whilst at the same time giving away free ad-space to try and keep advertisers, and doing everything it can to force subreddits to re-open. The protestors are both weak, and strong, depending on which argument makes Reddit look less-terrible at any given time.

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 62 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Huh. That's the same behaviour Unberto Eco identified with fascist movements in his essay on the subject, Ur-Fascism:

Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak". On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.

[–] DarkGamer@kbin.social 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That tracks, given that Spez admitted in a recent interview that he's emulating Elon Musk, champion of the fascist right.

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[–] GunnarRunnar@kbin.social 20 points 1 year ago

Not to blow anyone's mind but that's pretty popular rhetoric on Reddit. Usually when described how right speaks about the left.

It was not a coincidence ;)

[–] Untitled9999@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] IHeartBadCode@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

Doublethink Reddit

to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again

[–] resketreke@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] ArtieShaw@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

That would be an accurate description of what I did to my posts and comments on Reddit. But with the uncertainty and chaos baked in.

I like it.

[–] Meshuggah333@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

The enemy being both weak and strong at the same time is pure far right rhetoric. Judging by u/spez being a Musk fanboy, I'm not surprised.

[–] Perry@kbin.social 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm absolutely baffled over how much of a clusterfuck Reddit and particularly Huffman personally has turned this into.

Why in the ever loving PR suicide by not shutting the fuck up, did Reddit think that starting a war against their own moderators would be a good idea? I'm wondering if I have ever seen a company handle a situation this badly before. This is utterly insane.

Huffman has somehow managed to take a mild inconvenience that would blow over in a few days and turned that into a major crisis and then turned that crisis into an existential threat to the future of the company.

[–] athos77@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I made this comment in another thread last week, but I think it still holds up:

I think what this entire debacle has revealed is how incredibly unfit Huffman is to be involved in running a major site, much less one with as much reach as reddit.

I've read most of his comments and it's all centered around "reddit can't afford to keep paying everyone's API fees while everyone else makes bank". Which is fair enough.

But it also reads like a CEO who simply hasn't been paying attention to much of anything and who woke up one morning to realize that they'd already handed away the company's most valuable assets by letting Google and ChatGPT and other LLM companies harvest everything they need to build their products while reddit happily and blithely pays the bills. And now that other companies are starting to look profitable by building off what reddit paid to give away, Hoffman is both massively jealous and panicking, desperately trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

Only instead of going through every company that uses the API, figuring out how much they use and what they use it for and how necessary that use is for reddit's business, it looks like he panicked and tried to charge everyone the same rate. He didn't do any research into the issue and realize that Google harvests massive amounts of data that it uses in it's search results and to improve and program it's products and makes massive amounts of money, vs small apps that run basic queries that massively improve the reddit experience and that don't make much money at all. He just wants to charge everyone the same amount and keeps demanding that small apps pay the same as Google, because he's pissed he wasn't paying enough attention to notice what was going on.

And he's scared shirtless because he's had an easy run of reddit CEO, and now people are asking questions about his lack of vision and he's afraid that no one will ever give him such an easy and lucrative job ever again. And $10 million in the bank plus whatever stock options he has may look like a lot of money to us peons, it really isn't among the people he wants to keep hanging around with.

The one thing he's doing half-smart is the spin game. That's what that AMA was about, not to engage with the community, but to put out a dozen or so pre-written quotes that reddit could point to in interviews and say "look, here, this is what's really going on, and we've tried."

In the end, I think Huffman's massive failings can be summarized in his comment that "[reddit will] continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive" - as if the arrival of profits is inevitable and no one needs to do anything to ensure their safe journey. Which seems to summarize his period as CEO: just coast along like normal and surely some profits will arrive - and then panic when the profits start arriving for companies with CEOs who do they job and attention to their business.

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[–] Thetrademarq@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck. The last thing u/spez wants is a bunch of angry attorneys who want to fuck him over. If uklegaladvice makes a move legaladvice will too. If I were u/spez I’d be checking the strings on that golden parachute.

[–] Mjb@feddit.uk 31 points 1 year ago (4 children)

No-one is suing reddit for any of this. Reddit is a private business that can charge what it likes for it's API, can shut down 3P apps usage without warning etc.

The only power we have is leaving the platform.

[–] Rhaedas@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

You're right on that part, but how they've handled people's data and deletion/restoring is questionable, especially from a European standing.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago

If that was the only thing Reddit was doing in the midst of this shitstorm, maybe. But they've also been slinging threats and accusations around. There are laws against some of those things too, Reddit maybe should try treading a bit more carefully if for example they want to accuse someone publicly of "blackmailing" them.

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[–] MacDougal@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Moderating on discord seems quite difficult

[–] explodingkitchen@kbin.social 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Modding aside, my experience of Discord is that it's great if you want to use it like a chatroom, but it sucks if you're trying to search for information. I wouldn't think Discord would work well for something like legal advice.

[–] dismalnow@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@explodingkitchen

@losttourist @MacDougal

Discord has threaded discussions, but its truly a case of "jack of all trades". It's simply not built to manage they kind of content, and does nothing but realtime comms with any utility.

Guilded is better, but still relatively unpolished.

The only real apples:apples option for an exodus from snooville is a vbulletin site or federated boards like kbin.

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[–] tamtt@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For those who don't want to give Reddit the traffic:

We’re back - and here’s what’s happening

(Please don’t give any awards for this post - although it’s a kind gesture, that’s money that goes to Reddit!)

Hello r/LegalAdviceUK.

As you may have noticed, the mods have taken part in the Reddit blackout for the last week.

For those not in the loop of the drama, there are a lot of concerns about Reddit's recent changes and their response to user concerns.

LAUK took part in these protests, not only in solidarity with other subs and their issues, but we feel that these Reddit changes make moderating more difficult, and therefore present an increased risk of our users being exposed to harmful and dangerous advice, or influenced by idiots or directed by people looking to make financial gain.

The mod team of LAUK are mostly employed professionals either directly working in law (e.g., Solicitors, Police Officers,) or in related professional fields (HR, finance, etc); who rely on well developed mobile apps to moderate, which the official Reddit app has never, ever been good at.

Last month, the moderators manually removed over 5,500 unique comments that broke the subreddit rules - this is a very different subreddit to more casual subreddits and the mods take delicate care to balance the regulatory environment of giving legal advice in the UK, the Reddit platform, and trying our best to help people in need. This task would be impossible without 3rd party tool and applications.

Like many other subreddits, LAUK was recently sent a vaguely sinister and threatening message from the Reddit admins, attempting to divide and conquer mod teams, re-interpreting their long standing rules in order to desperately leverage them against the moderators who curate and manage their website in their own time for free.

Reddit is both stating the protests are having no or minimal effect, whilst at the same time giving away free ad-space to try and keep advertisers, and doing everything it can to force subreddits to re-open. The protestors are both weak, and strong, depending on which argument makes Reddit look less-terrible at any given time.

In response to these threats from Reddit, the LAUK mods have opened the subreddit under protest.

The mods are in discussion about the following changes:

Encouraging users to look at safer and more regulated advice options than Reddit

Supporting users to minimise supporting Reddit financially (e.g., use adblocks)

Moving our FAQ and wiki off-site out of a Reddit controlled location

No longer constructively working with Reddit admins - e.g., no AMAs, betas, surveys, mod council, etc.

Additionally:

We may decide to operate from whatever Reddit alternative turns out to be the most popular, or move platform entirely e.g. to Discord. This would be over the coming months

Some moderators may stop moderating Reddit to give their free time to the alternatives above

Our initial reaction was - as we suspect it would have been for many of our users if threatened in that way - to refer the admins to the reply famously given in Arkell and Pressdram. However, the primary motivator for moderators (as well as being power hungry neckbeards) was to help people using our professional skills and knowledge. Reddit is actively harming this community but the majority of moderators believe morally we should continue to use the community we have built to help people as best we can.

We encourage any admins reading this to look for other jobs at organisations who are not going to make you actively harm the community you are supposed to support, whilst excitedly looking to treat you like Elon treated 6,500 twitter employees.

For and on behalf of the LAUK mod team,

Fuck u/Spez and long live John Oliver.

[–] Timwi@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

Discord is a private corporation just like Reddit. Moving to Discord is, as some might say, out of the frying pan into the fire.

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[–] Cralex@lemmy.one 9 points 1 year ago

Such an eloquently written statement summarizing the situation and the stance of the mods. It truly felt as though the mods of LegalAdviceUK are a force to reckon with.

[–] ulu_mulu@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

Legends!! That's how everyone should react.

[–] lasagna@programming.dev 6 points 1 year ago

If that's how they treat volunteers, imagine their paid staff.

If my boss treated me this poorly I'd be packing my bags too.

[–] iAmTheTot@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The mods there are actual legal professionals. Would be interesting to see them stay closed and force reddit to act on the veiled threat. What mods would replace them?

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