@Liontigerwings: There's always been an undercurrent of "mods just want power and control because they can't get it themselves in their lives" that goes against my experience as a moderator.

Personally, my response to people calling for moderators to put their money where their mouth is, to step down as a moderator and leave the site was, "OK, will do".

I think this will be a 4-6 week process where people stop using their old Reddit apps and either migrate to the official app, old.reddit or to that federated sites.

I don't think it'll ever get as big as Reddit overall but so long as a good number of people come across to sites like Lemmy or kbin and are engaged, it'll be a vibrant place in no time.

There is some hope though. I think those naysayers were simply the loudest because when I go to some subs like r/pics, r/askmen, r/apple, people are supporting the strike. On r/apple, people are even made and saying yes, reddit’s threat to remove mods is mostly a bluff as they can not replace what was 5000 subreddits of mods in a timely manner. On r/askmen (which I usually dislike but today I’m happy with them) people are wanting them to extend the blackout. On r/adhdmemes, their poll is showing overwhelmingly indefinite blackout.

On r/pics most people love the new mod rule put in place to only post pictures of this one public figure

I think I've contributing factor that's likely is that the users that care already bailed and aren't on there anymore

I think there is some pro-spez astroturfing as well as some users are just sick of it and want their subs back.

I wouldn't doubt that the majority of users that supported the protest are probably bating their time. They're periodically lurking to see if there has been an impact, not posting, and/or deciding to quit. So what's left are users that didn't support the blackout, and they're pissed and very vocal, and upvoted by the rest of the community that supports u/spez.

I don't think the average redditor cares. They will complain about their third-party app going away, but will use the official one and go on with their life.

Now if we can just get Apollo and RIF for kbin we’re golden.

Many news outlets paint the protest as "mods dont like change, thats why they are protesting" which is missinformation and someone that is lazy to do some research doesnt see the importance of it

News outlet that said that

My take: The people who were in support of the protest were mostly the 3rd party client users and a lot of them left after the protest, leaving normal users, like myself, who are there for the content only, to vote for the sub to remain open in order to view the content again

I'm suspecting bot activity, iirc there was a screenshot of a new account that just spammed how much the protest sucked

Simply, there's not people I like anymore on Reddit or content I need. It's not a place for me now. I don't care what happens to it, I'll never go on it again. Thankfully I don't have mega niche hobbies so there's a lot of alternatives for me (forums or discords or kbin)

I went on there the other day and I wasn't really surprised. Getting the people to turn on eachother is the golden rule, and fairly easy. Most people just don't care. Fair enough. I personally like it better here.

Those who have an issue are leaving and not commenting or upvoting each other anymore either. This creates a sort of feedback loop where people critical of Reddit get less positive feedback and either they adjust their opinion to fit the majority or get downvoted. Thus minority opinions are pushed into small communities or off the site entirely.

It‘s always kinda been that way tbh, I could still tolerate it cause who wants to hear Nazi or tankie opinions for example, but now I‘m thinking I‘d rather be uncomfortable with them than comfortable with this hivemind.

Probably the latter. Most users likely didn't care about any of it enough to vote or participate in conversations leading up to blackouts, but got annoyed when they couldn't use reddit the same way. The rest of us probably started minimizing usage and/or deleting accounts.

there's a degree of contrarianism but here's the other thing

a lot of people using reddit...really hated redditors. it's completely ironic and irrational but it's not an uncommon type of group think within a group. a lot of the "smaller" subreddits in general, and I mean smaller as in millions of users as opposed to tens of millions like the giant /r/pics or whatever. those people will probably celebrate what they see as the migration of the "bad" redditors and are against the protest because they see it as representing general/"bad" reddit