Today is the final day for Apollo and many other apps/development teams who decided not to accept bullying from Reddit’s CEO/Executives. They are shutting down today rather than be extorted for money tomorrow.

Good for them.

But it’s a loss for the internet as a whole. Reddit has always been a weird and quirky place. It was the place you went to find real answers, real solutions, and honest thoughts. It was full of pornography, hate, MAGA, and diehard fans with next-level knowledge of bitch topics.

They would tell you if you wanted to know what the internet thought of your outfit. MaleFashionAdvice would try to help you look better. RateMe would either boost your confidence or destroy it. RoastMe would test how thick your skin was.

Want to deep dive UFOs for a bit before getting a good deal on a hard-to-find Patek? One-stop shop Reddit is.

But I left it behind. Like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter before it, Reddit is being driven to waste by greed. The only thing special about Reddit was the community behind it, and while there’s not some mass exodus from Reddit — those who made it special are leaving. If you remember other social sites being great before they got bad — this is what it looks like.

And unfortunately, as much as Mastodon, kbin, and Lemmy want to replace these tools: they won’t. They are too nerdy and intricate for even me. It turns out, despite what leaders/VCs/Asshats want you to think, it’s not the tech that made these places special. It was, and it always will be, the people.

People like Christian Selig make an app with more passion than you see in 99% of apps. Or the people who decided to be a ‘mod’ and all the woes that come with it were worth it for no pay. The countless others like me would show up to drop some esoteric knowledge for no other reason than to be helpful.

Maybe those ‘federated’ services take off, I doubt it, but maybe they do. Either way, they face the same problem as all the others before it have.

This brings me to discussion forums and blogs. They’ve stood the test of time, not because the tech is so outstanding, but because the passionate people who make things on the internet great are also in control of them. WordPress (not that Matt would) could turn awful tomorrow, and it wouldn’t be hard for me to mostly take my soap box somewhere else and have it back up and running without my readers being hugely impacted.

Forums have been around forever, they are still going, and I suspect they are the ones who will get the biggest bump overall. And why not? They are mostly pretty great.

So forget about Reddit and its bullshit CEO, and join a forum or start a blog. And then send me a link to your blog — I’d love to read it.