It can go one of a few ways.
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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.
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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”.
Funny enough, I’ve seen people assume Lemmy also forbids NSFW. I think they just never found lemmynsfw.com, which is basically the access point to the porniverse (you’re welcome btw if you found it here).
There was also the thing with Beehaw banning that one other instance with Loli, which might have been seen by some who hadn’t even thought of NSFW content at all as “oh, porn not okay then”.
The main problem with NSFW content in Lemmy is that it’s almost exclusively in some media format which effectively tends to put a huge strain on the system, be it technical difficulties or storage space in general.
If the lemmy platform wants to survive, NSFW content needs to be allowed but the technical difficulties will probably take a while to be fully resolved.
some nsfw subreddits use primarily redgifs. Same could be encouraged here
That’s not the only instance that allows nsfw even. The one I’m on seems to allow it if marked as such, though it’s not really for that in particular, and there’s a second furry instance that I’ve seen pop up recently with a pretty big user overlap with the one I joined that’s explicitly for nsfw.
Must be because users kept linking lemmy.ml as it was the big one at the time. I remember one reddit user who read the sidebar that said no porn and they instantly rejected the idea of switching