Reddit is nothing without users posting and upvoting posts and comments. If all, or a large proportion of the users stopped using the site, reddit would have to listen or they'd stop being useful. I think there are two problems:

1. As you said, users don't realize the power they have. It's a bit more nuanced than that, they do realize the power of the collective, but don't think the collective will exercise that power, and thus won't act individually. It's the same as "my vote doesn't matter, it's just one vote". This is obviously a self-fulfilling prophecy because they are making it happen, they simply need to follow what they think is right.

2. A lot of users don't care. Again, a bit more nuanced than that, most users probably have a preference reddit listens to their users, keeps the 3rd party app access, etc. But they don't care enough to do anything about it, which in effect means in any practical way, they don't care. I'm guessing that to them this feels a bit of a "niche" problem and will use the official app. There are a small amount of users, like me and probably you reading this who've left reddit and won't go back.

The protests have worked. They've moved a motivated minority over to lemmy and we're creating communities, posts and comments, contributing to apps and running instances. We'll spend our time and effort improving the tools and communities for the fediverse ready. Hopefully, with enough of reddit being reddit causing more waves of people in the future to seek another platform, the fediverse will grow and reddit will dwindle. That's my hope anyway.

Wow, I am surprised they would go this far if I'm honest. Are they actively trying to piss off literally everyone?

I think I disagree. I have heard this a lot on Reddit and I've heard it about Twitter, Google Plus and a bunch of other social networks and I've been on small ones and huge ones alike. Honestly, to me, when a social network is large it includes both nuanced discussion and there more casual posting. I don't see why both can't exist on the same site and I feel like it often does exist on the same site.

I also think people have a huge range of interests, some of which might be quite niche and having a large user base means these niche communities can thrive. When I've used smaller social networks, this typically has been the problem. They often have their tech communities covered and they often have other large common hobbies and interests covered, but if you take for example learning welsh or theremin music or something else, then you typically only get communities about those things on larger networks.

Lemmy calls them "communities" but since Lemmy federates over ActivityPub which can have lots of different implementations and Lemmy can speak to them, they can have different names. For example there is kbin which calls them "magazines", another implementation might call them something else.

I'm wondering if there's anything motivated users of Lemmy can do to help out and make the transition for folks easy.

I want Lemmy to succeed and fir people trying it out to like it and stay.

I hate it.

Usually I'm online but what if I'm not, or what if they have server problems, or what if in 5 years they feel done with the game and remove the servers. If I pay for a game, I want to be able to play that game on my terms

It just leads to a worse player experience now, and limited likely an inability to play later

To some degree, you're right, reddit probably won't change regardless of what mods do. If they really are feeling the blackout, as you'd say they'll probably just replace the moderators and open the community back up, rather than reverse their decision.

However, I feel like it's reddit doing the disservice to their users, not mods who are taking action by protesting. Ultimately, and if reddit do replace the mods and try and continue as normal, then it sends a stronger message to the community that reddit doesn't care about or respect them and it's not a not a good place to continue being.

In the dynamic between reddit the company running the site and the users, there is limited power users have against reddit which holds a lot of power, but protesting like what's happening now one of the main tools users have.

Nothing. I don't like how they treat their users and I dont trust them. It's not like they were great and this came from nowhere. Reddit has been getting progressively worse for a long time.

fortunately, we have alternatives and don't need reddit.

Another good link to follow the blackout is: https://reddark.untone.uk/

Here are some I find really useful:

• Jellyfin (media interface)
• paperless-ng (document store with OCR, tagging, search, etc.)
• Miniflux (RSS reader)

Think how the lettuce must have felt.

We've looked at the user data and carrots just aren't that popular, so it doesn't make sense to keep supporting them. We're working on a new vegetable which we hope to show off sometime new next.

From the Lemmy Github:

• Lead singer from Motörhead.
• The old school video game .
• The Koopa from Super Mario.
• The furry rodents.

Yep. Fuck him and reddit. I hope they realise their mistake and also realise it's too late and they've fucked up.

There are two mobile apps, one for Android and one for iOS. Check here: https://join-lemmy.org/apps/

Really appreciate these links! I've been curious to see what he's been saying but didn't want to give them any traffic.

ActivityPub is similar to email in a lot of ways but has some key differences. One of them is it's based around an "activity" feed where users can initially "create" posts/comments/etc. It also supports other activities though such as "update" (edits) or "delete" which are propagated across instances which have the content.

It should be that you can post a delete activity and the origional object (comment/post) is replaced with what ActivityPub calls a "Tombstone" which is basically just a place holder, this delete activity should be then federated across to other instances.

I prefer lichess, i like its analysis tools and the dev seems awesome.

Short: No

Long: Theoretically yes, but they'd need to completely change leadership and also give up any notion of going public and instead transition to a non-profit. I dont think they can be working for the community while chasing profits. They have been trying to exploit users for profit rather than work with them.

That reddit could see me return, but at that point it'd be a very different situation and a very different reddit. I don't think we'll ever see it happen.

This is huge, I don't have statistics but surely the most popular third party app.

I really hope reddit is hurt a lot by this move they're doing. It feels like it's probably too late for them to walk it back and that's probably a good thing. As much as I really enjoy a lot of the communities over there, I don't think it's healthy they remain on reddit, they clearly don't have the best interests of their users now, if they ever did. I know they've lost me and a lot of people who are moving over to lemmy, but I do hope a lot more follow and this hurts them.