Wow - thank you for sharing that. There are aspects of this instance I don't love, but banning over shadow rules is enough for me to consider just going elsewhere.

it’s just not as content rich as reddit at the moment

This can change fast.

You should've seen it two weeks ago.

The very minor and surmountable technical barrier of joining the fediverse will do wonders to screen out users capable only of the lowest effort.

Censorship of CCP criticism would be in the modlog if it were true. I've only been here a couple weeks but the only things I see the admins refuse to tolerate are racism, homophobia, and hate speech in general. They don't allow porn but that has more to do with practical challenges than any (expressed) problem with other people wanting it.

It is the modlog for the instance in the link (lemmy.ml, in the link I provided). <-- edit: I just looked and I'm now second-guessing myself on this

I think the only filter option is by user.

No, my subscription to !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com. I've been able to sub to other instance's communities fine in general. In this case I wondered if it required approval because I see this:

This is where the transparency that comes with FOSS vs private corp really shines. You can always check an instance's modlog to see for yourself where lines are drawn.

How do I move my subscription past the pending status?

What do we need to do to move forward?

Accept that much or most of reddit will look normal tomorrow. Reddit will proceed by projecting that everything is normal, whether true or not. Lemmy will continue to be an alternative with FOSS benefits and much smaller communities. Your own habits have to reflect what you want and there's no wrong answer.

I'm personally elated to find the smaller communities with higher-quality content. Thoughtful comments aren't buried under piles of karma-seeking horse-beating jokes.

At the same time, reddit continues to offer historical reference that won't be matched elsewhere anytime soon. I'm not going to rant as if the place has no value, or as if it can be replaced in a few weeks.

Lots to consider.

You can work toward both ends by trying to engage in something that cultivates marketable skills.

Khan Academy style sites are a population recommendation, but not your only option. Once upon a time, I learned quite a bit of coding working with robocode and had a blast doing it.

You could also get a VPS and see what you could get up and running on it. Maybe your own Lemmy instance! (admittedly that option is not free)

Closing registrations is all well and good, but can't activity / load still skyrocket as users from federated instances subscribe to, comment on, and post to their communities?

Are we defining failure by their standards, or ours?

When my favorite communities were wrecked by being moved to front page, default-for-new-users and flooded with low effort content that may as well have been bot spam, it failed me.

When they made an API policy that ostensibly allowed profitability (despite charging far beyond what they might make from ads on the official mobile app) and avoided training by AI (despite refusing to grandfather in known 3PA and offering to approve new ones), it failed me again.

If I'm soon unable to access the site via the old.reddit interface to avoid intrusive ads, it will fail me yet again.

I won't be surprised if others add more failures to this list.

Maybe reddit makes money hand-over-fist from these changes without me, you, nsfw content creators, licensing / API fees from all current popular 3PA apps, and whoever else. I'm not eager to characterize this as success because VC's get their money back.

Take the Lions as in beat overall record? Preseason? I mean, if it happens in the Super Bowl I won't even be mad ✊

The reg season game last year felt sealed around the time James Houston got that nasty sack on Lawrence. Nasty as in the move he made for the sack itself was incredible, and honestly the result to Lawrence was nasty in a bad way even if the actual tackle/hit was clean. (obligatory: hard to believe we found Houston in the 6th round and he twice the sacks in 5 starts than Thibodeaux all season)

There are sorts by hot and top, yes. I don't know the details of voting and/or replies that score comment order.

We waited for our images to load one line at a time and we were grateful, dammit!

There are actually some legit anti-spam reasons that reddit has been obfuscating vote counts and totals for a long time now. Even if this wasn't a known phenomenon, I don't think I'd trust the API call results anyway.

There's no accumulated karma score though. People should be less sensitive about downvotes and I'm hoping it will mitigate low effort karma-seeking content, at least somewhat.

That's fair to point out, but it implies the only utility users provide to the site is ad impressions. I see a couple of reasons this is not the case.

Mods make up a tiny portion of users but are disproportionately 3rd party app users and rely on 3rd party tools. But if any meaningful portion of the mod community leaves? The remainder were going to have a much bigger job without the tools. To attempt the bigger job with a smaller workforce is a double-whammy. Their only option will be to focus on their favorite subs and elevate more members to mods. The inevitable result will be experienced mods being far outnumbered by new mods, all of whom will have to stick to tedious tasks for subs to not be overrun by spam and hate speech. It's hard not to predict the same result as what's happened to Twitter's content.

Now consider nsfw content, which has always made up a huge chunk of reddit's traffic. Moderation is even more difficult there to begin with and could easily melt down for the same reasons, even setting aside reddit's growing distaste for it. Reddit is largely young and male and while many users may have no interest in it, the combination of nsfw imgur links going dead, moderation challenges, and the likelihood of reddit cracking down on nsfw is a combination that may cause reddit to be less attractive for many of the young, male userbase to visit.

I think your point still has merit - reddit won't miss many of the users seeking alternatives. I would say reddit's casual "I didn't even know there were 3rd party apps / old.reddit.com" users are also likely to be turned off by the ultimate results of their changes.

What really stands out from reddit's statements is the conspicuous lack of disagreement about the alleged charges to 3rd party apps. They can keep trying to characterize it as fair but the factual numbers in the conversation make it plainly obvious that they are instituting a model that makes it impossible for existing 3rd party apps to survive.

I just read that /r/lockpicking will be joining the blackout.