I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
I think the main problems with any new social media is the lack of users at the start. You offer the best features but it’s still garbage if you don’t already have a lot of users. As you said, Lemmy could add a lot of features that would help massively and that’s the main advantage, Lemmy is open-source and decentralized and is much easier to make those changes possible without any “leader” approval.
It looks like reddit users don’t have a saying and are not willing to force the CEO to implement some much needed changes and if the CEO decides one day to change something, well then to bad, you gotta get used to it because there’s nothing you can do about it. The CEO and everyone that works at reddit cares about the shareholders and not the actual users.
Lemmy is not perfect but I think it’s way better then reddit and has a bigger potential. Maybe one day Lemmy will be bigger then reddit or twitter. Getting the users is the hardest part.
I think that ship sailed. Lemmy blew it as a reddit alternative when moderators and admins wanted more/ total control over what narratives were allowed. Life doesn’t actually come with a guarantee of second chances,