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Says it is now a private group and mods don’t reply to messages - wtf?

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From the message on r/kde:

Many third-party apps exist to access Reddit using their API. A great deal of popular ones are free and open source.

Reddit has made changes in the prices to access their API that will make third-party open source apps used to access Reddit unsustainable.

This has the capability to kill third-party apps like Infinity and Diode, as well as Linux clients like Giara. RedReader was the only one lucky enough to be kept free of API charges so far, by Reddit’s own pick. Who knows what the future holds for it and other projects.

An unofficial poll on this subreddit done days ago resulted in favor of going dark.

We decided to go dark on 12/06/2023 until further notice. This means you will see a banner saying something similar to “This is a private subreddit” after this date.

For links talking about the situation, see the end of this post.

This does not mean you will have no means to get in contact with the KDE community.

You can interact with the KDE community on Matrix, Telegram, IRC, YouTube, PeerTube, Twitter, Mastodon, Facebook, LinkedIn, VK, Instagram, Mailing Lists, and more importantly, if you are looking for a Reddit replacement, consider our new forum, Discuss.

Discuss, our official KDE forum

You can access our official forum over https://discuss.kde.org/. It is a self-hosted instance of Discourse that is fast and well organized. It works well on mobile, too!

There you will see official KDE announcements, community content made by other members, local communities for your KDE users in your own country, and you will be able to ask support questions, brainstorm new ideas for KDE, share your desktop, see content shared by your favorite KDE contributors, and get comments from them.

You may sign up with your email, your Google account, your Github account, or with your existing KDE Identity account. Contributors with developer rights who sign in through the KDE Identity account will receive a unique badge.

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Just to add, more developers hang out in discuss than r/kde from what i’ve seen (i may be wrong but hey)

It’s way easier to answer problems here and help people solve them, especially since users can mark their threads solved when something is done.

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Thanks both of you - I appreciate your replies.

Cheers

Spinnekop

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I can’t see that message, is the subreddit still working and somehow some people can not see it? because I was a member of that sub and suddenly I can’t see it anymore. I hope things change in the future

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The subreddit should be put into read-only/restricted mode. It’s a real pain to google search for some KDE issues and most of the links are in r/KDE. Doesn’t really make sense to keep it private when even r/linux has been opened.

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Seconding this, having a massive headache because the Subreddit had solutions for everything, I never saw the poll (There should be a second one after now tbh, when people have had time to think things over), and this site is somewhat different in UX to Reddit, people aren’t familiar with it. Unless y’all plan on going through posts and porting stuff this isn’t bringing me joy as an end-user. Having the Reddit restricted keeps fixes available and on the front page of Google while still keeping up the protest. I disagree with privating the sub too because it doesn’t appear Reddit will back down and also by the same standards the Twitter account should be deleted too, they killed off their third party apps including a KDE plasmoid.

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Twitter didn’t go after the most fragile ego of them all, the forum moderator.

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Uhm, please stay nice. Our reddit mods were lovely people and so are our forum mods.

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subreddit mods shouldn’t be hiding information just because they can’t use their favourite third party moderation tool.

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It is my understanding that the subreddit community decided that.

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There was a poll on reddit, by someone who seemingly deleted their account since, that’s not the same thing. Ultimately the mods made the decision. Could have set the subreddit to restricted so people could read previous posts and directed people here for new posts. That would have been a much better solution

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How is a poll voted on by the community of the subreddit not the same thing as the community deciding?

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It was stated on the poll thread by a KDE contributor (veggero) that the decision to do the blackout was already made.

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How does that effect the community decision that affirmed the blackout? Multiple stakeholders can take decisions, nobody’s decision was overruled or ignored. The community overwhelmingly decided to go dark.

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If the decision was made prior, then the views of the “community” were and are irrelevant to the decision but lets go under your misapprehension that poll was meaningful

1: The poll was not restricted to kde users.
2: The poll was made just a week before the blackout
3: How many out of the tens of thousands of users on the subreddit voted?

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If the decision was made prior, then the views of the “community” were and are irrelevant

How does that affect the community decision that affirmed the blackout? If they were disagreeing, sure, but they didn’t. The reddit community wanted a blackout. The moderators wanted a blackout. They got a blackout.

Say I decide that I want to go sell my family’s house because the neighbourhood has gone down hill. So I ask my husband “how about we sell the house?”, knowing full well that I already have full intention of doing just that. My husband agrees. We sell the house. Did my intent pre-empt my husbands decision?

As for your points:

  1. Why would it need to be, there are not just plasma users hanging out there?
  2. A week isn’t enough time for active members of the subreddit community to show up?
  3. Why does it matter, there is no quorum based form of governance in place?
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This is a very rude comment, and not constructive. While I disagree with privating the subreddit, the mods weren’t power tripping.

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How does that affect the community decision that affirmed the blackout? If they were disagreeing, sure, but they didn’t. The reddit community wanted a blackout. The moderators wanted a blackout. They got a blackout.

Why should anyone care what a very small sample of the subreddit users, that may or may not even be kde users, affirmed. Least of all the subreddit mods since they made their decision prior.

Say I decide that I want to go sell my family’s house because the neighbourhood has gone down hill. So I ask my husband “how about we sell the house?”, knowing full well that I already have full intention of doing just that. My husband agrees. We sell the house. Did my intent pre-empt my husbands decision?

Spouses know when to strategically pick and choose disagreements.

Anyway, years of information shouldn’t be deliberately hidden/restricted because of such a non issue.

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For the record, there were two polls:

  • An unofficial poll on June 5, with 757 votes, where Close = 575 and Open = 182.
  • An official poll on June 21, with 1.5k votes, where Keep Closed = 994 and Reopen = 539.

The blackout started on June 12. The subreddit got reopened for a few days for the second poll, and the poll was announced on other social media on the same day.

Before and soon after it went dark, I tried to make sure that the needed information was available to users so they can still find the content they want even when the subreddit is private:

  • Make a very elaborate post providing extensive links on other means to contact the KDE community, and especially suggesting Discuss;
  • Have an image of the original post in the description of the subreddit that shows up for users saying it’s private;
  • Disclose this image on Lemmy, so people are still able to check why it’s private (admittedly a very small effort);
  • Respond to modmail asking about why the subreddit was made private, with a well elaborated boilerplate note and custom messages for people who were aware of the reason (I only had energy to respond to 150 modmails, and relatively late, a few days before the second poll);
  • Mention in the modmail responses that the Wayback Machine of Archive Dot Org can be used to view posts prior to June 12.

It’s worth noting that all moderators are also KDE contributors. Most active moderators were involved in the decision as well, most notably the ones who write/share official announcements.

I wasn’t particularly against the subreddit getting dark, but I heavily dislike the idea of cutting off content without providing alternatives and leaving users in the dark, which is why I put that much effort in it. Seeing those modmails was heartbreaking too.

Another thing of note is that the custom message that appears to the user saying that the subreddit is private may or may not be shown, which is probably why there were so many users asking about it. This happens depending on the client and possibly depending on whether the user is logged in or not, though I didn’t manage to confirm that. What I do know is that I remember that under certain circumstances, only the following message gets shown:

The moderators of r/kde have set this community to private.
Only approved members can view and take part in its discussions.

Last thing: when veggero said that it was decided before the poll, he was talking about a brief discussion happening a few days prior. The actual confirmation of the subreddit going dark and the details on how it would work were all done after the poll (more precisely on June 9). This is why the official post I wrote was posted on June 10.

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