So far the event went as expected. Reddit seems to be back and will continue to live on. It’s really unfortunate. I was hoping that this event could the the catalyst to break the monopoly. A 2-day protest just doesn’t cut it. And while I was keeping an eye on it a couple of really big subs were still “discussing” whether they’d got dark or not. If subs go dark one by one it just doesn’t have the same effect as a concerted, well organised simultaneous blackout. Without a fixed time.

With that much impact all combined subs could have made a difference. But they botched it.

Not only that. But if Reddit really suffers badly from this it might also have an impact on small communities. It’s really simple to set up a community on any topic on there. And it’s currently mainstream enough that you can get people on-boarded pretty quickly.

Larger communities may find a new home elsewhere. But for smaller ones that feels much more difficult.

Thanks to last week’s fiasco I discovered the fediverse and hopefully others too. I just hope it’s intuitive enough that people don’t get scared away.

From time to time I do think about the Carrington Event and wonder what would happen if something like that happened in today’s time. Because of exactly the reason of how reliant we are on electronical data.

How resilient is our infrastructure really? Especially satellites used for communication. I assume that most critical cold-storage is mostly fine. But all the small personal electronic devices will probably be toast.