Yeah you can't exactly take the subset of redditors still using the site during the blackout as representative of how redditors feel about it - anybody with any concern about it is not crossing the picket line.

Well, there are also apparently some alt-right goons who want Reddit to burn for shutting down their old favorite hate forums, and they're stirring up shit too.

I like those normies. It makes reddit feel a little more representative of the real world instead of the exclusive domain of cloistered nerds (I say that as a cloistered nerd). I’m here because federation is a better long term option for social media. I hope we can lure the normies over here too one day.

The way you put it reminds me of Digg. When the "normies" came along with Digg v2, the OGs (the cloistered nerds ^see^ ^below^) left.

It's worth noting that any company that operates a search engine probably has a copy of the whole web anyway and does not need to do API calls to get it. They just scrape it for search indexing. This includes, e.g., Microsoft and Google.