Where does your right come from? Who gave it to you?

While it would be nice to have clarity in such matters, it’s not something that’s owed to us (users). I can’t see how it’s normal to join a free website/service and start demanding things and telling admins how things “should be done”. It’s not a public service.

Users are simply guests and can shown the door at any time. Many redditors forgot this aspect.

A real world an analogy sounds like this (IMO). A guy has a house with a front lawn where he installs some benches. He allows people to congregate there. If people are rowdy, he asks them to leave.

If the owner paints the benches red, people can’t demand pink and instead they should go to the house with pink benches. If there are no houses like this, people should either buy a house with pink benches, or accept the rules of the initial owner and remain there.

Reddit was a place where people gathered and discussed different topics. Owners made a profit by serving ads, while people/users had a good forum. Win-win

Owners want to make more profit and are changing the site in ways users don’t want. Content creators will slowly leave and content will get stale. In about 2 years, it’ll become similar to quora, more like an archive.

End result: owners are morons who don’t understand how value is created with their product and instead of properly capitalizing on what they have, they’ll drive it to the ground. Or maybe someone else will be left holding the bag after the IPO. Either way, it’s a pity considering how much potential it has(had?).

It’s not rocket science but if we’re being honest about it, it’s not exactly an easy concept either. Going from centralised to decentralised for a social network is not an easy idea especially when one isn’t familiar with federation.

For example, at first I was confused because I’d browse a community on lemmy.ml, I’d want to hit subscribe, but then my account is on lemmy.world.

The fact that the website “moves” while I’m reading a post, doesn’t help either.

I had to get a better grip with defederation too. So, on one instance you see 4 comments, but another instance has 5. Because one of the instances doesn’t federate (at least that’s how I understand it now). Or maybe it’s just lag?

Anyway what I’m getting at is I understand why people say it’s complicated and I for one wouldn’t have bothered to get familiar with these concepts if reddit wasn’t going kaboom.

Why do admins owe anything to anyone? Their server, their time, their money => their rules. End of story.

Not worth it unless you use it for automation and personal notifications. You'll have to wrestle with google, microsoft and others to accept your mailserver. But if you do want to try, I recommend mail-in-a-box.