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”.

  • LoreleiSankTheShip
    61·
    1 year ago

    I’m not sure I’m on board with joining a local instance. I live in a very conservative and religious country and I don’t want to feel the need to censor myself on any community out of fear of having the instance admin ban my account because of differing beliefs. I’m sure it would work better for some than global instances, but I’m afraid they’d be prone to conformity and even nationalism.

    • DrQuint
      1·
      1 year ago

      Same thing here, but nothing to do with my community being negative influence. It’s just, simply put, that I’m a foreigner in my current community and share little of the languange and even littler of pop culture. And I was also too different from the people back in my home community (mostly due to demographics). Finding local IRL friends is not hard, but has actually relatively little with text discussions with them and I have basically no reason and see no value to look for those through social media. This whole “internet as an extension of reality” comes off to me as a “cityfolk” delusion, and a waste of the capabilities of the web.

      When mastodon was in the rise, there was this website that helped you find the perfect instance. They gave emphasis to three things, two of which were “geolocation” and “adequate level of teigger warnings”. I don’t care about the latter, and I actively want the opposite of the former. It was not very good of a recommender at all.