Discussion: Reddit has decided to force everyone to log in · Issue #609 · redlib-org/redlib
github.com
From Reddit's Q3 2026 Shareholder Letter (page 5 of the PDF): And a key piece of work to retain new audiences is shifting Reddit to a logged-in-only experience. It’s a big one for us, and it’s a bi...

Github redlib thread still unfolding. From reddit shareholder letter,

And a key piece of work to retain new audiences is shifting Reddit to a logged-in-only experience.

Most on lemmy know the privacy and bot-infested dumpster fire reddit is. So it’s very easy to think good riddance. But that misses an important point. IMO.

Inspite of the dumpster fire, it also contains a huge body of knowledge not found anywhere else. Example. Many times I have searched for a super obscure error message and the only good hits were a reddit thread in a tech sub. This is formerly open knowledge, accessible privately, now being closed and locked behind logins.

In old web forum days, weird niche info was distributed all over. That made it robust. Big tech social media displaced most of that world. It all got centralized. No matter hjow awful their algorithms are, no matter how toxic, those sites do have riches of knowledge.

We ARE losing something, if open access to niche info created by normal ppl is cut off.

“Ppl will figure a way around” you may say. There is no way to win that fight in the long run.

  • AliOski@feddit.nl
    4·
    13 hours ago

    Can somebody explain to me the differences between Lemmy and Piefed? It seems I am unable to access Piefed communities but they are amongst us. Has this to do with my specific instance not being federated with them or am I missing something else?

    • Blisterexe@lemmy.zip
      3·
      11 hours ago

      This page has a full list of differences: https://join.piefed.social/features/

      tl;dr is that:

      • It’s written in a different language, so appeals to different developpers, also claims to be easier to maintain and more efficient, but I can’t judge that.
      • Has Post & User Flairs
      • Has emoji reactions
      • Has polls
      • Has Post & User Flairs
      • Has multicommunities
      • A chat feature
      • Better moderation
      • a more feature-rich and (subjective) nicer default UI with stuff like consolidated comments,

      I can access piefed communities and posts from my lemmy instance: PieFed link: https://piefed.zip/c/[email protected]/p/1963727/growth-of-the-fediverse-20261102 Lemmy link: https://lemmy.zip/post/74312955

      Most popular communities are lemmy ones, so it might just be that you haven’t seen one yet, they should be perfectly cross-compatible (minus the extra features), since they’re both threadiverse software.

      • AliOski@feddit.nl
        2·
        8 hours ago

        I think I figured it out. Seems like due to my instance not being that active, many PieFed communities are not searchable because nobody interacted with them from my instance. After I input the specific community in the URL, and thén try to search, i can find it through the search function on my instance…

    • mseven@piefed.caEnglish
      1·
      12 hours ago

      I just liked the piefed interface better. Still learning how it works myself. Hopefully someone knows more.