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.
Tracking the lastest news and numbers about the #RedditMigration to open, Fediverse-based alternatives, including #Kbin and #Lemmy To see latest reeddit blackout info, see here: https://reddark.untone.uk/
Hello, mod here. I am glad you enjoyed our post. It felt appropriate.
Comments were also made to the admins in modmail directly too.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Probably don’t even need to ask. I’m sure that eventually we’ll come up with a means to snag dead communities, as there’s gonna be tons of them.
You do know that you can visit kbin from lemmy, and lemmy from kbin? You don’t have to choose 1 of the 2.
Had no idea what-so-ever :)
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.
Christ, we’re gonna have to learn how a whole infrastructure set up works.
@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
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.
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.
@LollerCorleone Much appreciated, thank you!
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.
@jherazob
Yes, definitely - thats why we have made the spaces but are not migrating over for sure, we’re just exploring options.
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.
Nah. The mods spoke about it, but broadly they just care too much about the people that need the subreddit.
@Litigant-In-Person@kbin.social you guys are badasses, you made my night. I wish you good luck. I love that you’re competent enough to strike well. I hope to see you in the lemmyverse, be it on kbin or lemmy or anywhere. 😁
Hello, LAUK mod! Thank you for all the good help you’ve given people over the years.
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.
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.
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.
add in some jealously towards 3rd party apps providing better service, wasting time and money on failed reddit NFTs and avatars, general cost-cutting moves with post-pandemic layoffs and closing API (like nobody is going to waste even more of their bandwidth with other types of scraping) and you have spez the prepper techbro playing CEO
Is THAT how his comment is supposed to be interpreted? I’m an accountant, and I read it as “we’re drowning, and we’re going to go bankrupt without a new vertical!” If he said that as a sound bite for IPO news, he seriously miscalculated imo.
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?
Nah, 90% of them will happily stay on Reddit.
Right now yes. But I think they point that things shift a bit will be when 3rd party apps and mod tools are more fleshed out. If Lemmy keeps up with moderate growth until then I think we could see a significant portion of posters moving here. Not saying most, but enough that communities could thrive. We don’t need millions of users.
Yes. Good. Piss off the lawyers.
I’m sure that’ll go over well.