It can go one of a few ways.
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Apart from the few subs that remain offline, it’ll basically be back to normal. Those that do remain offline indefinitely just get forcibly reopened or recreated by admins, especially huge subreddits like /r/videos. Smaller ones just get redicted to /r/topicnew or some other creative name.
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A lot of subreddits and more importantly moderators and users leave the site permanently. In order for this to happen however, there’d have to be a consensus alternative, which there isn’t ATM. Otherwise, these communities are pretty much lost forever unless the mods put a message to go to X alternative service in the “subreddit is private” banner. Tbh, I don’t think people are gonna stomach losing years of their lives in an instant so they’ll just re create subreddits unless the mods provide an alternative.
No matter what though, they’re not backing down on the effective removal of the API (still leaving the sneaky clause “you can pay us if you want but it’ll be a king’s ransom” for AI, even though they can just trawl the web manually lol). They’ll probably announce some crappy customization features to hoodwink those who don’t know what an API is and lie to them and say it’s “API v2” or whatever.
I just honestly don’t know how it’s going to shake out and I’m scared im going to lose these communities. I don’t give a single solitary fuck about Reddit the company anymore, and I never did really. I just hope all of the subreddits find a new home and don’t just shrug their shoulders and say “welp, guess that’s it guys”.
Reddit was never going to just shut down overnight, but it’s more or less done for me (barring some sudden change with the API stuff, but even then I’d make an effort to use it less). I’ll keep my account around and might occasionally go to it to look up specific things or visit more niche communities that don’t have much of a presence here or on other alternatives yet, but I’m done with just generally browsing reddit or providing any content for them. I’m enjoying it here and hope the boost in activity allows for continued growth and filling out of communities for more specific topics.
I think we’ll see a temporary “return to normalcy” after the protest finishes and most subs come back online. But come June 30 and the end of third-party apps, we’ll see a bunch of users come back to Lemmy/Kbin again.
In a way, this seems like the best way of driving things. The protest has raised awareness and got a ton of development work going, and then there’s going to be a respite giving instances time to prepare themselves for the second surge.
you cant really return to normalcy from this, but i dont think most users care. whenever i get into a casual convo about the fediverse online, the general consensus from people is ‘yeah reddit isnt going to die, i’ll stay on reddit for my communities’. so if the majority think reddit isn’t going to die and continue using the site, it probably wont die! it’ll just go back to normal with a few million less users (which actually isnt that much for a big site) unless spez hilariously fucks up
really the fediverse is just a lot of people who like tech at the end of the day, not the average web user
Squabbles seems to have not hit user critical mass. Tildes looks like it’s doing well.
The Lemmy + Kbin fediverse seems to be taking off like a rocket and has the best overall chance IMO of becoming the home for the best parts of Reddit’s community.
I want to add, that my wife has been a “scab” throughout all this and has been active on reddit, trying to show me memes and such.
The content she’s been showing me has been stale, old stuff I saw back in 2020. Same recycled jokes, same memes. Reddit is in a mode of hard cope right now and I doubt it gets better if we don’t return.
For the first 12 hrs or so it was just a bunch of as reddit posts. Like 20 pages of it and a few political
According to Reddit’s internal memo, they expect this to blow over Wednesday with most subreddits returning, and they reported no drop in revenue so far. So they’re not likely to give in yet.
What needs to happen is that the blackout needs to continue indefinitely, and more communities need to start migrating to lemmy/kbin. If we move the content here, people will move too.