It can go one of a few ways.

  1. Apart from the few subs that remain offline, it’ll basically be back to normal. Those that do remain offline indefinitely just get forcibly reopened or recreated by admins, especially huge subreddits like /r/videos. Smaller ones just get redicted to /r/topicnew or some other creative name.

  2. A lot of subreddits and more importantly moderators and users leave the site permanently. In order for this to happen however, there’d have to be a consensus alternative, which there isn’t ATM. Otherwise, these communities are pretty much lost forever unless the mods put a message to go to X alternative service in the “subreddit is private” banner. Tbh, I don’t think people are gonna stomach losing years of their lives in an instant so they’ll just re create subreddits unless the mods provide an alternative.

No matter what though, they’re not backing down on the effective removal of the API (still leaving the sneaky clause “you can pay us if you want but it’ll be a king’s ransom” for AI, even though they can just trawl the web manually lol). They’ll probably announce some crappy customization features to hoodwink those who don’t know what an API is and lie to them and say it’s “API v2” or whatever.

I just honestly don’t know how it’s going to shake out and I’m scared im going to lose these communities. I don’t give a single solitary fuck about Reddit the company anymore, and I never did really. I just hope all of the subreddits find a new home and don’t just shrug their shoulders and say “welp, guess that’s it guys”.

  • UnspecificGravity@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I think the missing element for fed sites is creating a level of experience that works seamlessly for users that are not tech savvy at all. The really big genuine innovation that Reddit made was bridging the gap between “the internet” and “regular people”, which granted access to an enormous wealth of information that more tech focused sites aren’t ever going to be able to achieve because those totally non technical users DO have a shit ton of other knowledge and value to bring.

    • AfricanExpansionist@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      The Reddit site design was terrible when I first started there. I didn’t know there were other subreddits.

      Can you browse Lemmy without an account? The vast majority of Reddit users have no account and view the front page

      • HappyHarryHadron@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Can you browse Lemmy without an account?

        Yeah you definitely can, I have a few other instances ‘Community’ pages bookmarked so I can go and check them out if my main instance is down. Is read-only and you can’t vote but that’s not really a big issue.