this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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You forgot to mention reddit and spez basically took over and booted admins from subreddits to make them available again
afaik that's been the policy ever since. If the mods don't fully comply with all instructions, they are removed, and then because it's modless they get to put in new ones. Basically lackeyism at digital scale.
It needs to be understood that the culture before this happened was very different than it is now.
The mods basically owned their subreddits. Mods could do anything they wanted. You could ban someone for the color of their socks. You had full control of the CSS coding and functionality of your subreddit, so you could make it look like dogshit for the laughs and ban anyone who typed the letter L. Some subreddits got popular just for being weird like this. Whatever you wanted to do, it didn't matter. If you didn't like how a subreddit was ran you just made your own. If you made a subreddit then that was the corner of your internet to do whatever you wanted with. That was the tradeoff. You got a space in return for creating it. You didn't even need to moderate it.
After the mods got removed from their subreddits for protesting it became very clear that the subreddits were not theirs anymore. It was the first time reddit ever took actions against moderators for something that wasn't blatantly illegal.
Yep, when they started forcing subreddits to open after having gone dark, that was the final straw for me. It was clear reddit was saying "fuck you, we own the platform and you can't do shit about it."
At the end of the day it's the fundamental issue of allowing all infrastructure to be owned by any individual or small group of individuals
"Shareholders"
Well, you have to understand that what you write on redditor isn't owned by you, buy by reddit. And a lot of people didn't, so they got angry when they felt "their" stuff was taken over by reddit.
Stuff isn't really yours here on Lemmy either. Instance owner can't pay anymore, or simply isn't in the mood anymore, the close their server down, the stuff you posted there is gone, and you won't successfully sue anybody about it.
People tend to feel "grandfathered in" when they were in control of something for a while, but that can be misleading. Reddit was never a socialist paradise that they ran out of the good of their hearts.
Yeah, it was a palace coup as he had Schwartz indirectly eliminated.
What happened was a reminder that anyone calling themselves Redditors are literally serfs walking on spez private property and the bastard therefore can eject anyone.
And 99% returned to posting, belly-up, like nothing happened.
I noticed a significant shift in the conversation, I think a lot of people left
Reddit has somewhere north of 100 million MAU. Lemmy has somewhere in the realm of 50k MAU, or 0.05% of Reddit. Even factoring in PieFed, etc., we're talking about a drop in the bucket for Reddit.
A lot of people came to Lemmy, by Lemmy standards, but almost nobody left Reddit, by Reddit standards. The case can be made that our 0.05% are the the best 0.05% of Reddit, but it's still teeny tiny. 99.9% of users just bent over and shouted "Yes Spez!"
Edit: this article includes active user estimates each quarter, and the numbers continually seem to be going up.
Active users that post and comment matter much more than the total number though. Lemmy of course is much smaller, but it certainly has attracted a decent portion of reddit's "active" users
That article doesn't attempt to differentiate between human users and bots.
Also, Reddit has gotten significantly more ban-happy since then, which is almost certainly creating a chilling effect on discussions there.
It doesn't take a lot of that to cause a shift in conversations.
Even if 90% of Reddit's MAUs are bots, Lemmy would still be <1% of Reddit's human userbase.
They are getting paid on their active users for advertising and investors. I would guess the active humans involved is >1% of them.
Thanks for the explainer, I see what you mean