/r/flashlight is on strike
https://reddit.com/r/flashlight is on strike from June 12 to June 14 2023, if not longer. So are many other subreddits.
Why this is happening
This is in response to Reddit's decision to kill off third-party apps with API pricing nobody can afford. The power users who create content and moderators who run communities represent a large fraction of the users of those third-party apps. Reddit is only valuable because of its users, and does not compensate us for our time. Now they're going to make our experience worse to try to squeeze a bit more out of their advertising metrics.
In response to community concerns, Reddit's management gave a few prewritten answers to softball questions and further reduced confidence in their intent to manage reddit in a way conducive to hosting communities there. In the mean time, check out:
Other flashlight communities
- /c/flashlight on Lemmy.world - like Reddit, but federated (see below)
- /m/flashlight on kbin.social - also federated
- Budget Light Forum - a good old-shool web forum, now running more modern Discourse software
- ##flashlight on libera.chat - IRC channel frequented by people like Paramatrek and ToyKeeper
- Flashlights on Discord - popular real-time chat, but yet another centralized service
An incomplete list of reviewer websites
Most of these sites have RSS feeds so you can stay up to date with them even if you're not participating in the same communities.
- https://zeroair.org
- https://flashlightreviews.ca
- https://tgreviews.com
- https://1lumen.com
- https://timmcmahon.com.au
- https://liquidretro.net
- https://www.stephenknightphotography.com/
- https://zakreviews.com
What's next
Cory Doctorow proposes that this kind of failure mode is inevitable for centralized, for-profit platforms like Reddit. He writes:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I think it would be wise to stop relying on such platforms as communication tools and places to build communities and instead move to systems without a central point of failure. The leading currently available options for doing that are federated alternatives to the big platforms. If you use email, the concept should be familiar: we don't need to use the same email provider or software to communicate with each other.
Mastodon is the best known; it's a federated alternative to Twitter. Federated alternatives to Reddit include Lemmy and kbin. Being federated, there are multiple servers, or instances that can all talk to each other. I use Lemmy.world and kbin.social and suggest trying out both, though it's possible to access both communities linked above from either server. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, kbin.social is having technical issues from a DDoS attack, which I hope they'll have cleared up soon. Here's a bit more information about Lemmy and federation.
Farther into the future, people are working on options that are even more decentralized, not even relying on a server. Here's one proposal which has produced a demo site that does appear to function. It succeeds in being so censorship resistant that it was full of content I don't care to link.
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