Seeing more “cake days” pop up lately, it seems we’re approaching (or in) the 1 yr anniversary of the Reddit migration.

It’s kinda sweet actually that we all get this reminder of it with the pickup in “cakedays”.

It reminds of my seeing the wave happen. I was on lemmy before the migration (not a flex, I joined mastodon in the twitter migration and explored the other fediverse platforms around looking for a reddit/forum alternative) … and followed a bunch of communities over on my mastodon account. Early last year many of these communities were fairly quiet (or at least quieter than now) and so I didn’t really see any of them in my mastodon feed. I’d actually forgotten that I’d followed them. I’d heard word about the API stuff over on Reddit, but I knew something was happening when I started seeing more and more posts in my masto feed that confused me … it wasn’t clear where they were coming from. Double checking I’d see that they came from lemmy communities I’d forgotten about … and I realised I was seeing lemmy literally come alive!

All these cakedays are kinda the same thing … a sort of internet equivalent of a weather event or season.

  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
    611·
    5 months ago

    Yeah its been a journey. My cakeday for the an account I made on ml would be about now, and I think its around a month till this account is officially a year old.

    Its an odd time to be on a platform like lemmy.

    We’re seeing an almost complete adulteration of what we might call the internet 2.0 era sites into walled gardens of exclusion. Effectively, the stealing, en-masse of almost two decades of user generated content. The walls and gates of the gardens we planted get higher everyday; the enshittification of all things.

    And yet here we are. On a self-hosted, federated, unbought, unbroken, and unbent platform. Obviously its not all roses, but for what its worth, both the users and developers have created something incredibly special: A ray of hope in a time where it seems like the world has only been changing for the worse. And while the instances have their differencs, we should be looking to embrace those differences as much as possible, because this is what truly gives the fediverse strength. If its Kbin or Lemmy or Mastadon; or .ml or .world or .blahaj.zone.

    The point of the fediverse isn’t consolidation or control, but distribution and access. There is so much more possible simply because enough of us were willing to make the journey over here. We’re providing the future with an alternative that isn’t tracking them, trying to manipulate them with an algorithm, or to turn them into commodities. There is power in that.

    So happy cakeday. Happy cake season to those who were messing around with a browser plug-in about this time last year, trying to delete their reddit history. Happy cakeday to the developers, to those who post, and to the commenters. And most of all, happy cake day to you dear lemming reading this. You make this place happen.