Then the admins will just override them and force the subs public. They’ll also remove the mods and appoint new ones. The only thing anyone can do is stop posting and leave.

But at least we are doing everything we can to inform everyone about what’s going on, why it’s bad, and why we’re upset. We also let them know that there’s a place to go where we can rebuild what’s lost.

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!

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?