You don’t have to walk away, you can migrate. This is more an issue of building your house on the king’s land. The mods that stayed should serve as a warning to the rest of us that building a Reddit community means that Reddit owns the community you created, and that as a moderator Reddit owns you.
Anyone who’s ever tried to get a friend group to change chat apps knows this isn’t simple.
I imagine doing it with a few thousand people is even more difficult.
I tried to get my friend group to move to Signal from FB messenger because I did not want that nasty shit on my phone anymore. They were not interested at all and acted like it was the most inconvenient thing in the world. I ended up uninstalling FB messenger anyway and only check it on my desktop and rarely respond now unless it is a one on one conversation or directed at me in a group chat. I told them if they want/need to get in touch with me right away to use old school SMS or actually call me.
Oh geeze, so much. “Hey just grab Signal real quick, it’s super simple and private and SMS seems to get worse as time goes on anyway. Plus I can send you better pictures and videos!”
“Lol meh why you tryin to sell it to me.”
It’s weird, the things people really dig in their heels on. They’ll download apps for the silliest thing but “another chat app” is such an inconvenience.
It’s the only reason I think reddit dot com still resolves at all anymore. If the users weren’t the product, to both the company and other users, better alternatives would be the norm by now.
You don’t have to walk away, you can migrate.
We tried that with Lemmy and many great communities only have one or two people posting consistently.
Most people don’t care about behind the scenes
It depends, if mods were fully onboard and had a plan it definitely works. Just look at Piracy or Star Trek communities.
I just checked the Star Trek community on reddit and it’s still up with 753k members and 189 online. The Lemmy versions I can find are a fraction of that.
The idea of Lemmy is great but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking big communities actually migrated.
And look at the ttrpg.network community for a counterexample, they still have a pinned post on the dndmemes subreddit advertising Lemmy and ttrpgmemes gets like .1% of the traffic dndmemes does. And this is still after a months-long rebellion complete with allowing NSFW and restricting submissions to a single user account, both things that would normally kill a subreddit dead.
