The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. It's the official end of the battle. The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.
Was there really going to be any other outcome?
Nope. And the goal of protests aren’t necessarily to force change, it’s often just as much about raising awareness and attempting to change the discourse with those who hold power. So I think these headlines don’t do the movement justice.
Yeah. Idk why some people think the goal was to kill reddit.
The goal was to make Reddit sellable.
Have they done that? I don’t know. Probably.
Does that mean that they had to take their soul and dice it up, throw away all the juicy pieces and take the remnants and sell them on the black market to the lowest bidder?
Yeah.
Will I ever go back? Sources say no.
True. That’s Reddit’s goal though, not the protestors’. I think they’d rather the protestors leave, tbh.
I did go back for r/place, but I haven’t touched reddit since. For me, the goal was/is to find a decent alternative so I won’t have to put up with reddit. I found it so that’s a win for me. Although I’m not gonna lie and say i may still visit for some info that I won’t be able to find someplace else (reddit has acquired tons of useful information over the years, unfortunately).
That goal would’ve been closer if the planned 2 day protest was more like 2 weeks or, better yet, indefinitely.
There were a couple of mods from what I’ve heard who shut their subreddit down until Reddit took it over and to those mods I tip my hat and say way to have some testicular fortitude.
As far as I am concerned, the goal was to get them to renegotiate the API pricing and restrictions, at the risk of the IPO tanking if they didn’t - even if they would have to fire Steve Huffman first.
So yeah, it was a failed protest. If Lemmy continues to grow I’ll continue to spend most of my time here, but that seems like it’s no guarantee.
… Of course if (as in when) Reddit removes old.reddit then I’ll never return there beyond holding my nose when trying to access search results. But 90%ish of the users are already on new reddit/official app and just don’t care.
Imo there’s enough people on here already. It would be nice if it could grow to enable more niche communities, but for my current usage there’s more than enough people
You’re right, what I meant was if it doesn’t shrink by a lot as users go back to Reddit (for those niche topics for example)
Depends on how one defines “win”.
We coulda gotten more people here. Reddit’s kind of the perfect centralized service to decentralize. Major subreddits have millions of subscribers and mods with years of experience managing large communities. Many of them could have set up their own Lemmy servers and just said “we’re over here now”. You get a few large, but still not exactly mainstream r/all kind of subreddits doing that, and things could’ve been significantly different.
At the same time, there are several ordres of magnitude more people here now than there was before, and the space isn’t showing any signs of dying. That’s kind of a big L for Reddit, as they’re going to continue enshitifying themselves in the months and years ahead, and there’s a legit, if somewhat underground, alternative space for people to go when they’re finally fed up. Now with an insane amount of mobile app support, to boot.
It’s better for Lemmy to grow slowly and have a userbase that is small and in-good-faith for as long as possible, so there’s time to build the necessary durability into both the software and the community.