We didn’t lose. Reddit lost us and will continue to lose.

Reddit offers nothing without its (human) users. They can chatGPT all the posts they want to try and look busy, but people are gonna notice the lack of original thoughts and leave. It will be slow and it won’t be complete, but it is happening.

Fediverse services need to lead with the “all” feed. People don’t want to be pressured to pick a server without knowing what’s on it or where everyone else is. When you go to reddit, the first thing you see is the r/all feed. The posts and content is what gets people to join.

They may have fell for the astroturfing campaign or just don’t see the issues due to not having the traffic that larger subs do. Even if they did, if they never show up on r/all, the only people that would care that they went dark, are their small communities.

Then there’s the results. Mod teams got completely gutted and replaced in the bigger subs. Why would they risk their positions and community for a site where they post for free?

Maybe they polled too. If the communities didn’t want to stay private, what’s the point?

They destroyed trust. It will take a lot of work and time to get that trust back. If that’s their strategy, their investors need to be in it for quite a long haul!

Now THIS is what we need to see!

Now we have a UX option (and a good one at that!)

I’m hopeful but it will take a while. I want to see where we are in 6 months from now. Apps need to be pushed to the stores (at least on iOS).

That being said, it needs protocols for migrating instances when an instance is dead or about to die. Then there are some privacy concerns and such. It’s also not clear how it all can sustain monetarily except via donations.

But seeing the recent growth spurts and increase in new posts, I am still hopeful that this place has staying power.

A few last minute loopholes were carved in according to comments in this post

• some apps have gotten a temporary reprieve such as Narwhal
• Some apps have gotten an exception for access for visually impaired.
• the NSFW block is exempt for mods so if you start your own sub, you can still see all content or so it seems (I’m not quite sure because Narwhal still seems fully functional in this regard and I am not a mod)

So Reddit is forcing open a piracy sub. I wonder how potential investors would feel about that?