Yeah, I agree with you there. The whole point of the Reddit site and software was to iterate on a social media platform whose content is self replicating (not actually self replicating, just produced and sorted and distributed by entities who don’t live on the balance sheet).

Fundamentally though, wrestling with the impact and purpose of social media is more important than preserving an unbroken line of content pipelines. Lemmy was fine before the Reddit protests so it’s not like telling incoming users that they’ll have to figure out what’s cool instead of relying on a bunch of people they never met to tell them will kill the platform.