ragebutt

I promise you your definition of worthless is far different than an investors

The stock market is overwhelmingly owned by about 10% of Americans who tend to be on the very wealthy side and the “mindless capitalism drones who simply want number to grow” side. They just see user growth and applaud. They love this change and all the changes Reddit has made over the past few years because it means harder to scrape for free and more likely to convert casual browsers to users

What is potentially killing Reddit (and twitter, Facebook, etc) is that advertisers are starting to lose patience with bot activity, which is the overwhelming amount of content on social media. The misleading statistic that those companies throw out is that bots make up a (relatively) small amount of accounts, which is arguably true, but sidesteps that those bots post like crazy. Thus the “power user” effect, where 5-20% of the user base makes up like 90+% of content. Advertisers are getting wise to the fact that an overwhelming number of social media interactions are just nothing (and no one they can sell to) and they’re starting to demand better analytics as well as run their own

This is where Reddit is potentially screwed; meta has dozens of other things to fall back on besides ad revenue. Twitter has Elon propping it up. But this is still pretty wishful thinking, the reality is that Reddits valuation will likely be propped up by institutional investors for years, maybe decades, on the hope of something that never comes (see: Tesla). The quality of the site is essentially irrelevant

Reddit sucks but this is asinine. The stock is down ~35% this year but still up almost 250% since ipo.

Discord is privately owned still but you bring up another key point: the players you’re up against are so powerful, with so much wealth and the most comprehensive legal representation, that even if you manage to have some success they will either buy you or destroy you. Meta has a presence on the fediverse, even

The numbers are staggering. A game is incomparable. Facebook has over 3 billion users and instagram has another 2.5. Even a game like Fortnite “only” has a bit over 600 million users, and the vast majority of games see nowhere near that

You can bootstrap an audience in the millions, maybe, with a lot of luck, but getting to meta numbers takes significant capital to sustain your advertising. More importantly even with that it will still take ages. Facebook took almost a decade to get to a billion. Reddit took 18 years

Both platforms (and twitter, etc) are obviously infested with bots but what’s interesting is that from some research it appears the percentage of user accounts that are bots are far lower than many guess. I’ve seen people guess like 50+%. Per Facebook it’s more like 4-5%, and while Reddit doesn’t disclose based on content removal the numbers are similar (possibly slightly lower). This is definitely underreported though as it’s in their best interest to inflate user counts. Independent research pegs it closer to 20%. But the really interesting part is what validates the people guessing 50+%, which is user activity. Neither network comments on this but independent research pegs bots as responsible for like 50-70% of user activity.

So if you can get a network going with power users you can make it feel much more alive with possibly only 30% of the user base. But that’s where the staggering numbers come in. For Facebook that’s still 900 million people, almost 3x the entire population of america

They won’t do that because it’s expensive and free software generally doesn’t have the budget to do this

I don’t know why you think the “just works” is any different from tunneling with a service. Your server is still opened to the internet through upnp with direct connections and through a tunnel to plex.tv when a direct connection is not possible. In fact plex is inherently less secure because their infra is both the encryption endpoint (as opposed to your client with Jellyfin and Tailscale or whatever) and their infra has been vulnerable in the past (like the massive breach in 2022).

Jellyfin with something like nginx and a vpn is open to the internet, yes, but a service that tunnels (like wireguard, Tailscale) bypasses this issue and it’s up to you to set it up as to your level of comfort

Plex is just easier but as with all things tech (especially those infected with VC dollars) “ease” translates to less secure and far more likely to exploit your data

Yeah obviously, you can also use Tailscale to tunnel to whatever service you want (including just to the server itself). But if you’re bothering to override remote plex access with all this I don’t know why you wouldn’t just pick the option that doesn’t harvest your data and increasingly treat its customers as hostile

Outside the network you still have to open your server to allow plex cloud to access it and potentially tunnel your traffic through plex.tv if a direct connection doesn’t work. This happens automatically but it does happen

With Jellyfin you just have to supply your own relay, like Tailscale or wireguard, which does require more setup but is completely free, means that you can stop your media traffic from being funneled through services that harvest your data (which plex absolutely does), and doesn’t go to shit if plex.tv goes down