I don’t, just like I don’t own YouTube nor Twitch and have presence on both. Being an extremist in these matters leads you to wherever the FSF is right now, but it’s a good idea to be aware of what you’re getting yourself into and choosing a self-hosted alternative when you’re willing to give up some of the perks that the big platforms give you.
I know that eventually I will have to move away from Discord, once the enshittification rate starts growing too much.
I would do this if it were possible - I scoured the settings yesterday and did not see this option.
Hi. I completely understand not wanting to participate in reddit given all this drama lately. It’s understandable and reasonable to not participate in platforms that exhibit values that are irreconcilable with your own. On my part, I don’t know if I will keep using reddit or to what extent I will if I do.
However, I don’t think permanently closing the subreddit is the right way to go. It is making a personal decision with consequences for the whole community. People who choose to use reddit should have the ability to form a community around the naturally fitting /r/zig namespace. The current message displayed when trying to access /r/zig is, IMO, a distraction from the Zig mission statement. Imagine a Zig newbie on reddit who tries to load up the subreddit for the first time being greeted by a totally out-of-scope statement about reddit “profiteers” and being directed to go somewhere else. “Hey man, I just wanted to learn about zig…”
I hope that you have the opportunity to re-home it to mods that are comfortable with whatever reddit eventually becomes even if you decide that you no longer wish to participate in it yourselves.
I can appreciate where you are coming from - you want to include people who are coming from other platforms and make the language accessible to them. I can understand and see the benefits of this approach.
There might be a need for a perspective shift. Correct me if I am wrong, but I’ve noticed a common sentiment: large companies seem to position themselves as the primary point of contact to things. From a scalability point of view, this makes sense (they put a lot of resources into being a one-stop-shop) but I do not see a reason that this must be the case.
Tell me if you agree with this sentiment: as a community, Zig doesn’t have to avoid or abandon other platforms, but we don’t need to support them in all of their idiosyncrasies either. Realistically, you can’t stop someone from posting about something where they want to. That said, you don’t have to promote every place where something can be posted either.
It seems like individual moderators had a lot of power in making this decision too - those people need not speak for an entire community either. Either way, I’m curious about what your opinion is to avoid being sunk with another ship. It seems to me like we need to have something independent (regardless of size) where the discussion can be about code and not about the platform where the code is being presented.
I think you are mistaken that there was a community at /r/zig. I think @kristoff’s point about it being more like a train station is spot on.
It seems like your main concern is that something of value is being lost, but that’s precisely the point I disagree with.
Mainly, I no longer wish to do the thankless work of moderating a subreddit, and I wish to nudge people towards what I think are more healthy community spaces, such as this one. If you or anyone else wants to start a new subreddit, go for it. But I am happy to vote with my moderation powers by intentionally evicting everyone from reddit to whatever degree possible, which in this case is shutting down /r/zig.
To @kristoff 's point though - train stations do have value. That said, they don’t need to be the main focus. They are, by definition, liminal spaces that are transitional by nature. I think what I was trying to point out coincides with your observation here - a lot of people imagine that the reddit boards are a community and they are sincerely not. They function as a point of contact (what I was mentioning above) but they are not a community proper that warrant dedicated and ongoing support.
My main concern is just general politeness towards people that choose to use reddit; that the subreddit name, /r/zig, will be unavailable to anyone who wants to build a zig reddit community either now or in the future. It seems similar to cybersquatting to me. It’s not that a community at /r/zig was lost, but that any community at /r/zig is prohibited. For example, my old /r/zig posts are now inaccessible to me.
My opinion is that if you don’t want to moderate, that’s fine. If you prefer and suggest people come here instead of reddit, also fine. But, preventing people from using /r/zig that want to use it strikes me as “taking my ball and going home.” It coerces people on reddit and interested in zig to start working around obstacles (e.g. creating /r/zig2 or /r/ziglang or whatever) that are all about reddit and nothing about zig.
Again, I’m not arguing that you or anyone else needs to participate or moderate such a community, but I think it should be allowed to continue to exist for the people that want it.
I don’t agree that it’s an issue of politeness. They’re withdrawing support from a website that they feel is making decisions that do not reflect their ethics and communal goals (as a lot of people are at this moment). I don’t see a problem with taking your ball and going home if you genuinely do not agree with the game that is being played. This also seems like a stretch:
It coerces people…
Coercion is a very strong word here - yes, this is the internet and people choose whatever word they feel is right… but coercion? I don’t think closing a reddit forum is a form of coercion. I’d go as high as inconvenience, but not much higher than that.
Changing ownership of a community is a bit like a rug pull, especially for people who haven’t been following the social developments closely, who will continue to think that the sub is still run by Andrew even when it’s not. You can give your community to somebody you trust, which is better, but what if you don’t have somebody you trust who is also willing to take on the responsibility? Do you give it to somebody at random?
Personally I think this aspect trumps having a fancy name. Just make r/zig_language or something similar at that point. You can make a good community even if you don’t have the most official sounding name for it.
The lost content can certainly make it more difficult to transition to or use Zig in general. Zig already has a very small amount of community resources (relative to other languages) and the reddit thread is a large source of helpful information for users. Even now when I search for specific issues I’m running into, a reddit post nearly always shows up, however, is now un-viewable.
I certainly understand and agree with your personal view on the subject. But it feels like punishing the Zig community to make a point
And these are the people that said “Hey main, I just wanted to learn about Zig” ? They would go off and start a new sub?
To me, the message is totally in-scope and on-point given that it achieves two objectives for those real newcomers to the Zig ecosystem:
I acknowledge that losing access to the previous posts of r/zig is a loss in termos of the knowledge that many users shared when answering questions, but this is just one of those circumstances in life where one has to take a loss as part of taking a stand. Maybe there’s a way to export that content to make it available as an archive web page somewhere else? (In light of recent Reddit behavior I’m guessing the answer is no…)
Cybersquatting; another example of a hostile profiteering strategy. To my knowledge, r/zig produces absolutely no profit (in $) to anyone (except Reddit), so I disagree in finding it similar to the current situation.
created an account here just to come upvote this post, killing the sub has real rust foundation vibes
My claim is that pushing this decision on the whole community is inappropriate. To protest the API cost’s hypothetical damage to the community, reddit mods (both in /r/zig and elsewhere) are inflicting actual damage to the community. I believe a moderator’s role is a steward of discussion and not to enforce of techno-political viewpoints on the community, unless such political views are the explicit focus of the subreddit.
It seems like the calculus going on by the zig leadership is that the value of the protest outweighs the perceived minimal value of the /r/zig community. Personally I don’t feel that way. I’m (currently) a casual follower of zig and am much more likely to engage in discussions and stay informed on zig news if I it shows up in my feed instead of requiring my intentional visit to this site, the discord, or wherever. I don’t think that this potential culling of the “casuals” is desirable because it will increase the echo chamber factor by having only die-hards self select into dedicated zig discussion platforms.
I’m not looking to argue any further or change any minds that are already made up. I just wanted to share a different viewpoint that I think closing the subreddit permanently is a mistake and will hamper the success of Zig going forward. I hope you all reconsider.
Thank you for sharing your perspective, @fluffynukeit. I think with what you just wrote I can now give you a better answer.
The Zig project has no official mods. The Zig community is decentralized, and each will have a different set of rules to follow if you want to participate. We (the ZSF) reserve the right to remove from the official list any community that we feel is too out of line, but that’s it. This is written on the frontpage of https://ziglang.org, btw.
r/Zig is one community that also happens to be managed by Andrew. He created it, he set it to private now. He’s also not “a moderator” but the BDFL.
I strongly recommend reading this blog post if you plan to invest time and effort into Zig:
More in general, Zig as a project is a humongous “fuck you” to big tech, starting from having a 501c3 non profit that pays developers instead of being a tool for big tech to build deeper trenches, up to the kind of stuff we discuss at our in person events. Take a look at Software You Can Love to get an idea.
I mean this without any hint of hostility: it might be a bit too early for you to have a good time in the Zig community. We’re still building the basic infrastructure and most of what we do is geared towards fostering collaboration between people who have a strong interest in improving the status quo (call them die-hards if you want), and that’s not optimized for “casual followers”. Right now the people that we need to be involved in the community are those who are willing to pick up a shovel and start digging.
So, yes, you’re totally right, the leadership’s actions at the moment are not optimized for the casual follower, and that’s by design. Casual followers don’t donate their time and money to the ZSF, and without those the Zig project doesn’t exist.
Come back in a few years and you will be able to enjoy everything that we’ve built without having to witness any of the strife that got us there. If instead you want to be an early adopter, then you will have to watch us play the open source game.
We could look into migrating the content of r/zig to something else. reddit2discourse? reddit2json? Other communities besides Zig might be also be interested.
This might be nice especially if there were discussions worth preserving there. Maybe the subreddit could be made public but restricted for a period of time so that the contents could be scraped? Would Andrew and/or Loris be open to this idea?
Looking at the forum…I feel young again. Hope we can develop great culture here
I did some searching and found this extraction site, but it seems to me that it’s not a free service. https://socialgrep.com/exports
Yes, from $50 up.
Closing the subreddit is a mistake and it makes no sense, but I don’t expect much from community management where the whole proto-documentation is locked behind discord for no reason.
Discord is a for profit, closed source app that has been shoehorned and shilled into the gamer community to the point where you can’t exist without it. They are not friendly to third party apps and there are loads of instances of mismanagement to the point where people have actively migrated to matrix especially when it comes to far left or far right discourse which have been purged while extreme pornography and other types of malcontent haven’t been touched. I just checked and it took me like a few minutes to find an animal torture discord channel.
Reddit has always been an astroturfed censored 9gag like shithole and will always be. This does not affect smaller subreddits .Example: c_programing.
There is no reason to close the subreddit but keep the discord, when stuff like https://www.linen.dev/ exists other than emotional arguments about some debacle which doesn’t affect and shouldn’t concern Zig at all.
The Zig foundation needs to choose a set of limits and standards regarding communities because that is how it lives or dies. ( This might be wrong, I hope it is. I’m unsure about the statement. )