I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
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.