My thinking is that they’d buy it to harvest the data for AI training.

The user experience is pretty much secondary to the strategic play here.

Reddit’s value is in the body of data its amassed, not in the ongoing service to users it provides. Limiting 3rd party access is all about protecting that and has the added benefit (to them, not the users) of creating a walled garden where they can increase the (meagre) margins from advertisors by controlling the data flow to users.

Not saying I am a fan of all this, I’m just recognizing the situation.

I really don’t know though…

I wonder about the odds that Google would buy reddit. Not saying it’s a good thing, but it could be a strategic play for them.

That’s more or less what I’m thinning, though I’m not there yet. Still need to understand what persists on my server etc. Ideally I just want a portal/gateway to centralize connections to the outside world. This would let me control my own credentials and have a single login (notwithstanding additional protocols)

I’m not interested in persisting much data.

I worry it’ll become a headache though. Already I’m finding compatibility issues in the fediverse - when I tried Jerboa, my first toe in the water here I realized it didn’t work with lemmy.world because of minimum version level. Obviously it’ll iron itself out in time, but it does highlight that running an instance is not absolutely set-and-forget.

Thanks for responding!

You know, I was also comtemplating creating an instance (private) for just myself to centralize a single account and then picking and choosing from all over while maintaining my own ‘home’ that only I control.

I need to research it a bit further though. The idea has some appeal.