Quote from the post:
Hello everyone, I’ll try to keep this short as I know there’s been a lot going on over the last few days. When we made our announcement last week, we intended to get Reddit’s attention on a subject that our team found extremely concerning. /r/Videos is joining a larger coordinated protest and signing an open letter to the admins found here.
The announcement was of exceedingly high API prices which we all know was to intentionally kill 3rd party applications on reddit (Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Boost, Relay, etc.) Since that post several things have become clear; Reddit is not willing to listen to its users or the mod teams from many of its largest communities on this matter. Yesterday all major third-party Reddit apps announced that they would be shutting down on the 30th of June due to these changes. There were no negotiations and Reddit refused to extend the deadlines. The rug was pulled out from under them and by extension all of the users who rely on those tools to use reddit.
In addition to this, the AMA hosted by Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, which was intended to alleviate concerns held by many users about these issues, was nothing short of a collage of inappropriate responses. There are many things to take away from this AMA but here are the key points. Most disappointingly it appears that Reddit outright misconstrued the actions of Apollo’s creator /u/iamthatis by saying that he threatened Reddit and leaked private phone calls, something done only to clear his name of another accusation.
So what’s happening? The TL;DR? Effective tomorrow (6/11/2023), /r/Videos will be restricting posting capabilities. Anything posted before the cut off date will likely be the final front page of our community before we go private indefinitely. In the unlikely scenario that Reddit ownership has a sudden change of heart and capitulates on their decisions we will reopen, but until that happens /r/Videos will stay closed. Many other communities have come to similar decisions and we support those who have decided to take a stand.
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.
Lemmy exists at least since 2020, when I registered to the platform. That is 3 years ago and it hasn’t had much of activity until the Reddit drama started recently
What’s happened with Twitter and now Reddit is hopefully enough to make people realize the pitfalls of corporate-owned, centralized social media. Mastodon has really taken off with some major news outlets now posting on there. I could see the same happening with Lemmy now.
They might do that, but for how long? I can only see them gravitated toward doing the same thing in more subtle ways if that’s what earns them the most money.
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.