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".
Honestly, the lack of mainstream appeal is part of why I like it.
Just remember - as content is generated SEO is naturally going to improve, which will start to bring people into kbin/lemmy via Google.
As people spend time here marketing types will start to notice. Shortly thereafter we will see bots. To me, how we as a community handle those bots will be the real "does this experiment survive" test.
Absolutely. It's only a matter of time before someone sees the value in the information/data that is here and begin indexing the entire fediverse/site and working on SEO for it.
There are countless examples of indexers for GitHub for example, if you do any searching for questions related to coding. Pretty much every issue and repo has been indexed.
When reddit first popped up, posts from it came up in search results very rarely, now it's pretty much at the top of many searches, since it's a bastion of knowledge and community groups.
It's really only a matter of time if things do go well here.
We need google stealth mode hahah!
Me too. No large corporations guiding the communities and more open discussions can be had without fear of being banned.
Not sure about that. I saw a post today about lemmy.ml's admin, who's also one of the main lemmy developers, banning people who said something bad about China for "orientalism", then doubling down in it in the comments. Apparently mod logs for any instance can be accessed by any mod of any other instance. Otherwise I wouldn't have even known. Not sure how I feel about using a service developed by someone so toxic, who's also in charge of a big chunk of user accounts.
If you dont like the moderation here you can use a different instances. Thats the main reason why Lemmy has federation. And our job is to build this software, not be perfect moderators who somehow make everyone happy.
And if I want to participate in a community that's hosted on lemmy.ml I'm still under his jurisdiction. Besides, someone this banhappy being in charge of the development doesn't fill me with much confidence. Nothing stops them from implementing some hidden change that prevents sharing something they don't like.