Instance Updates – June 2023 – Reddit Meltdown Edition

It seems that centralized platforms are facing an enshittification problem lately. It’s because of funds drying up or the platform’s management baking anti-consumer decision such as overpricing their API or allowing hate speech on their platform.

While I wrote a long writeup on trying to convince Twitter users to switch to Mastodon, especially our instances at Sakurajima, we know this enshittification trend so well. We have finally made efforts to comply with the Mastodon Covenant to increase the trust of potential users. After all, we have been around for 7 months and are in this for the long term. We are listed on Fedi Garden and in the process of getting our server added on JoinMastodon.

With Reddit charging for API access with extremely unreasonable costs, you might wonder what the alternatives are. There is Lenny and KBin, but I am not interested in setting those up. We actually have a Xenforo forum. I set this up in the early days to allow users to have more extended discussions where a microblog format wouldn’t do so great at.

With Reddit tearing itself apart, we invite everyone member of our Mastodon and Calckey instances or adjacent anime communities on the Fediverse to participate in our forums community. While it’s not federated, since Xenforo doesn’t have ActivityPub support, you can talk about anything as long you don’t post hate speech, harass, or troll users. Members on the Sakurajima Mastodon instance can simply click the Mastodon button to log in or register. For other users, you can use any third-party accounts we support or register with an email address.

In short, don’t build yourself there if you don’t want to face the enshittification problem with central platforms. Build and own your own stuff and community.

If you have any suggestions on what you like to see on our forums, feel free to reply to this article on the forums.