I haven’t used reddit for like 4 days which probably hasn’t happened since I signed up. I’m planning on staying here. The reddit of today isn’t like it was in 2011, it’s exploded in popularity. If the vast majority people truly cared about poor social media business practices Facebook Meta wouldn’t be around.

I never expected the blackout to kill reddit or even for them backout of the API changes (especially after the spez AMA). But I will say I’m surprised at the influx of people to lemmy, I started on lemmy 5 days ago and even since then there’s been an explosion of content and discussion which has made it a viable alternative for me.

I was a huge lurker on reddit because it seemed like my voice would never be heard or that it was probably already said. I’m trying to break that on lemmy and I encourage everyone else to as well.

The whole thing had a huge effect from my perspective - I deleted my 14 year old account.

While realistically I wasn’t expecting the death of Reddit, I had hoped something would happen, but, it’s now 2 days later and subs are open and it’s business as usual. Some gaming subreddits are even taking absolutely atrocious stands where they claim they HAVE to be open for the upcoming update to XYZ game. r/Games somehow thinks the various gaming showcases is justification for staying open, and r/Halo justified coming back online because Halo Infinite launches Season 4 next week. Funny enough, I was just perm banned from r/Halo because I called the mods out…

Lemmy has blown up within the past week. “Taking down reddit” was always a pipe dream, but now we have a real alternative with committed users. I’d call that a success.

As subs come back online, I might pop in from time to time until Apollo shuts down at the end of the month. But as marshoepial said above, we have real viable alternatives now, and I want to stay on the fediverse and watch it grow. If Apollo shuts down on June 30 I will use redact.dev to edit all comments as others have done. Reddit isn’t worth much to me without Apollo.

Keep in mind that some subs are back online specifically to ask users what their next move should be. A few subs I’m subscribed to are considering rolling blackouts or allowing posts only one day a week. There’s still 2x the amount of subs currently private than total subs that originally signed up! Many news sites are reporting that the blackout is continuing today (shout-out to all the reddit journalists fighting back with the tools they have). Its way too soon to declare this whole thing “didn’t work”.

Many subs are down indefinitely and a large portion of supporters are gone completely, reddit also has gotten a hell of a lot more toxic, more bots, and more company dick sucking since the blackout, this website will not get new users.

I’m curious about when the 3rd party apps stop working. I think a whole mass of users were really lost as to what was happening and why. I was also surprised at the number of comments I saw of users who never used a 3rd party app. I felt bad for their experience. It’s like learning that someone doesn’t know what sunshine feels like on their skin, cause they’ve only seen it through glass block.

I think the idea of federation (choose a server, subscribe etc.) is too much for the average user. A small bubble of tech enthusiasts and more tech-friendly people will stay and enjoy the niche place. Maybe that’s for the best for now. But in the foreseeable future most of the users will stay on the big platforms… Most people are afraid of changes in every aspect of life, so they stick to the known.