Yeah I mean that’s a fair point. Their motivations seem pretty clear. I just know that getting people to migrate, especially non-technical people, is hard. So I can see how many communities might end of staying there if it is at all viable.
I don’t feel heartbroken for reddit itself. But I do think there are a lot of small communities on reddit which will either have terrible trouble trying to continue surviving there, or which won’t be able to reconstitute into the alternate ecosystem.
I imagine trying to migrate a community would be quite difficult even if you did have some very tech-savvy mods, and many mod teams will have no idea what this whole ‘lemmy/kbin/beehaw’ thing is.
So there’s a number of communities that I think just aren’t going to make it, and that’s sad.
And yet, if Reddit backs off enough for people to continue moderating effectively, I think the damage to them in the short run will be relatively low. In the long-run this debacle has done a lot to drive people to the larger ‘lemmy’ community. Since that has help grow the federated alternative community, that could have lasting implications for reddit as they move forward with… whatever they’re doing.
Man it’s just so wild to watch what’s going on over there right now. Even when subreddits come back after a couple days it may not matter if bot-assisted becomes impossible over there in the long run.
If reddit backs off enough to save the accessibility and moderation issues, I hope enough people still leave to help create a strong alternate ecosystem.
If alternatives like this site had existed through previous years, I don’t think Reddit could have survived a lot of its previous mistakes.
Once you find an out-of-instance community you can subscribe using the whole url as Giraffes19 said. To find communities across instances, you can use https://browse.feddit.de/