Nathan Campos

I won’t lie, if you look at my Reddit profile you’ll see that I’ve commented more here in the last couple of days than probably the last 3 years on Reddit. The community just feels more welcome and I feel as if my comment will get read instead of being drowned out as it happens on Reddit.

Even with things like Treble the updates still have to come from the OEM, so unfortunately I don’t see the situation changing any time soon.

For most of the users currently online it’s extremely difficult to understand the concept of federation and how everything works, so I doubt it’ll ever be as prevalent as “the big social media platforms”, but for technically-inclined users, it’ll definitely have at least moderate success.

It’s quite sad that Google never figured out a way around this issue. The real problem is that they push the responsibility of updating to OEMs, which have no interest in updating their “old phones” (1 year old in most cases) because a new shiny one has been released.

I think the only way to really solve this is to make Android like Windows used to be back in the XP days. OEMs get a base system and they can customize it to their hearts content, but the updates to the base always come straight from the OS developer, no matter if the “OEM customizations” are ready for it or not.

There are lots of extremely useful information that has been posted on Reddit over the years, just think of how many times you’ve searched for things like “best X alternative Reddit” and found a great app suggestion, or when you searched for an error and someone asked about the same thing on Reddit a couple of months ago. This knowledge needs to be preserved and we do need to help the Archive Team out so that we can keep this invaluable source of knowledge.

Saldy it’s very common to have this influx towards the “main server” as people that are not used to the federated aspect come to the platform.

Either way, it would be interesting to collect this information and later post some metrics about the exodus from Reddit, kind of like how Fosstodon and other Mastodon instances did when Twitter had their issues.