I mean, what this whole situation has shown us is the fragility that our reliance on that site creates. It would be a real mistake for us to go back at this point, because it means they (or their successors if they manage to actually sell the sinking platform) will eventually pull this stuff again. Trying to build a replacement community is a very difficult thing because of network effects, but this dramatic fracture has given us the opportunity to maybe pull it off.
So I see this as an attempt to create further disruption that prevents one of these alternate sites from solidifying as a true replacement, and little else.
I got mine today too (well, apparently it was ready yesterday, but I didn’t download it until today) and I was struck that the “chat history” doesn’t have all my chats in it. I was in particular looking for the exchanges I’d had with a representative of a company working on a VR headset. I guess maybe the other party deleted them. But I found at the same time that the chat widget on the site no longer has any of my chats in it. It just has a “start a new chat!” button. Super weird. The site really feels to me like it’s getting more janky.
I still have an account there, though I’m not using it much and am considering my options for data takeout and deletion. It feels pretty different to me, though, honestly. I think seeing it as though “things are dying down” is short-sighted. With the mod teams wiped, BotDefense gone, and so forth, I don’t think things are going to stay “back to normal” for long, even if you think they’re there at the moment, which I kinda don’t.
That said, I’m not at all certain the fediverse can take its place. It’ll depend a lot on how many folks start to use it. It’s an uphill battle.
But Reddit, well, I expect it to head downhill pretty badly.
I dunno. It’s hard to separate the two roles of mods. One role is in preventing abuse–posting illegal content, hate speech, etc. But another role is in policing the content for what does and does not fit a forum’s purpose. You can do the first and keep section 230 protection, but the second is inherently and inextricably editorial in nature, and you can’t do that without losing protection. And I don’t think the lines between these are well-enough defined to enable you to make them two separate jobs without getting into trouble. Like, a lot of communities allow a little self promotion, but not spam. Managing that is a ton of work, but probably can’t be a paid role because it’s a judgment call. That sort of thing.
It’s frustrating, because it’s pretty clear at this point that this is one kind of web site that we really want to have exist. But the laws around this are really janky, and trying to revise them is a problem because the debate around them is even stupider than the laws themselves.