Don't know if it fits here, but after the blackout I came across this comment (the picture is a fragment of the original comment) unfortunately I forgot where I took it from.
If anyone knows, please let me know so I can credit them properly. For accessibilty purposes, here is a transcript:
I'm angry that some of you are just fine with losing this place - this place that is my home on the internet, This place that I and my fellow mods have been fellow members FOR YEARS, right along side of you.
I'm angry. And I'm angry some of you aren't. That you're fine with this place becoming the festering flaming garbage dump that is every other social media platform.
But no one deserves for me to take that anger out on them. But please reflect on why we've fought to KEEP being here for you and for ourselves when this place changes overnight. Because it's about to. And I likely won't be here to watch it because it'll break my heart
End transcript of photo.
I saved this because it struck a chord in me, after I randomly found out about the protests and trying to salvage what I could.
The confusion turned into a low panic, which turned into grief and anger. Reddit used to be a little niche hobby hole for me to delve into from time to time. Those subreddits were there for me during some of the worst times of my life, and now, all that information would just be gone. I tried to save as much as I could, which wasn't much. Ironically, this was the time when I stumbled upon some of even more niche subreddits, that I knew would take too much time to try and archive.
Archives that would live the same way the dusty screenshots live in my phone, unused in years. But I couldn't just let them go. As I spent a few weeks gathering up what I could, not beliving myself that I was grieving a weird form of social media, I started noticing the lack of geniune community. It felt so empty, and that made it easier for me to move on.
The whole reason I felt at home on Reddit left and came here. And on Lemmy, I could feel at home once again, and I never looked back.
First, I both upvoted and, being on Kbin, boosted this thread, so please don't misunderstand me here, I'm riffing off of this and instead going off on a tangent, not criticizing the actual content of this thread.
I feel like most people here are fooling themselves. When they posted stuff originally, there was little expectation of return, they just offered. Now, through the rims of nostalgia, they talk about value lost... but "what" exactly is lost? (that is not my attempt to suggest that nothing was, but to ask what precisely it was that was lost?)
Things posted to Reddit are still there, unless you specifically go to the effort of removing them. And there are a lot of positives about it being thus: it is maintained on servers, yes it is buried amidst bot comments but so long as it is SEO-googleable it is still "discoverable". If it were copied over here then it would be duplicated and so preserved twice-over, but as we have seen, Lemmy/Kbin instances can go down too, the victim of DDOS and such. One thought: if it is truly valuable, then add it to wikipedia? And YouTube, and Twitter (I hate Twitter and do not have an account on it, but some people will find it there), and everywhere else that will help connect people to it.
Gun to my head, if I had to articulate something that I think was the thing that was lost, it would be the "hope" that Reddit would be this shining beacon of knowledge, but without anyone having to pay for it, e.g. like wikipedia, which notably is constantly begging for scraps. In other words then: that capitalism would save us? That a corporation, whose sole goal in existence is to make money, would "take care of us", as a result of their kindness, goodness of heart, and spirit of generosity? i.e., that spez is "daddy"?
If you ask me then, and no I am not trolling but I mean this sincerely, we are better off to have received this harsh wake-up call. Yes it is painful, but we are all better for it. By looking back, wishing for what was - or worse yet, continuing along without acknowledging that it even so much as happened - we ignore that what it always was was a trap: we give them content and they monetize it however they please, under the false pretenses that it was ever truly "ours" to begin with. If we are honest, we were aware of that. Nor, at the time, did we care, b/c at the time, we got something out of it too. But over time, many forgot...
The only thing required for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing.
Mods especially are receiving a rude awakening: most are finding out that they are not nearly as popular and in-tune with their user base as they deluded themselves into believing. I say this as a former mod of two subs myself, until last month. People enjoyed Reddit and they more or less liked the free services that mods were offering to them, but now that the mods have left to start new communities on Lemmy/Kbin they can suck a bag of dicks for all the normal Reddit user cares about. Oh sure, they will whine when they see ads between every third post, more ads added to comments, bots making up every fifth comment, and the like - but they will not DO anything about it, hence they offer their tacit approval, thus proving spez correct: he can do whatever he pleases, and people will not do anything to stop it. But why are we surprised? Did we not know that they were sheeple?
TLDR: Don't Look Up, unless you can handle what you will see. It is not pretty, but it is the Truth.
Basically, Reddit will become a hollow corporate piece of shit like Quora or Facebook so the deluded pigs can buy "shares of reddit" completely not understanding how it's the worst investment imaginable. One of these alternatives will eventually rise up because of dedicated mods and people like us, then the mindless normies who are still chained to reddit will find out about us and migrate there, but it IS KEY THAT FILTH THAT RUINED REDDIT never be allowed to have any power on the new site.
Meh, it is their money (the venture capitalists), so what do I care how they waste it? And it can do a service for us all - it can keep the Reddi-Trolls from migrating here, by offering playtime funsies over there, for a fee ofc.
As for the rest, "we" will forget. It seems that the original migrators from the likes of Digg, Tumblr, MySpace, etc. forgot their origin stories as they moved onto Reddit, and likewise some will forget after a decade or whatever here (if this place even makes it that long). But also, those who are paying attention may never fall into that trap again - this community is not a monolithic entity and both will be true in the days ahead. It will be interesting to watch what happens:-).
But I think you hit the nail on the head there: builders will always build, and for those who see the truth, we don't even want to live inside a walled garden, especially now that we have that fresh example of what happens to those who do.
Beautifully written.