No, don’t point redditors to our servers, let them find by themselves. It’s a great filter. If someone is motivated enough to leave reddit then he will find us.

I think a lot of (Americans, at least) have poorly understood ideas about what protesting is and how it’s supposed to work–in no small part, I think, due to the sanitized way we’re taught about things like the Civil Rights movement. The idea that a simple show of solidarity with an announced end date would, I guess, guilt trip(?) Spez into doing the right thing was always an absurd idea, divorced from reality, and only slightly better than doing nothing at all. There’s been headlines all day about Spez’s comments about waiting for the blackout to blow over, but that’s pretty explicitly what the people behind the blackout said would happen.

Admittedly, prolonged blackouts will probably just lead to the offending moderators being replaced with new, compliant mods, but that’s still the preferable outcome. It at least leverages the unpaid but not unskilled labor moderators currently put into Reddit into something vaguely tangible–the effective and smooth running of otherwise unwieldy subreddits. Large-scale subreddits that can only function with expansive moderator tools, automod, etc. will potentially suffer noticeably when being operated by new scab mods. That decreased user experience would actually be potentially effective.

It’s also why federation is important. Maybe I’m just old and miss the web 1.0 days, but the current social media landscape is a cancer of enshittification. Kevin Rose killed Digg, Mark Zuckerberg killed Facebook (and Instagram), and Spez is killing Reddit. We need a decentralized internet, even if it’s intuitive at first.

We can only do what we can do.

I think of the 90-9-1 rule. If 10% of users leave or spend less time, there’s less content. Less content means the 90% will go elsewhere.

With something as big as Reddit it was never going to be easy, it was never going to be quick. But this will hurt them.

Don’t think about it as a war lost, think of it as a battle lost, but serious damage done.

Also don’t go back, that’s exactly what they’re betting on.

I was hoping the threat of the blackout would be enough, but Reddit knows what it wants and will either force the change or die trying. This is not good community stewardship. We should all find a new home.

The win from the protest for me is discovering the Feddiverse. In time it will be just as good as Reddit for community and information. I intend to use it, and support it though content and money.