I just saw this post over on r/modcoord which is basically a massive list of subreddits participating in the blackout protest. If I’m being honest I haven’t seen this much anger and coordinated frustration since the era right before the digg exodus.
Assuming more and more subreddits join in, it’s going to send a pretty massive message to the users who interact with a blacked out subreddit. Then I’m trying to imagine what happens if after a massive coordinated blackout, Reddit continue on the current trajectory. Is Lemmy even prepared to handle the amount of potential incoming traffic that API closure could lead to? It’s absolutely bonkers to me that the Reddit team might just stay the course…
Reddit knows something we do know: that Lemmy is still young and still has some serious issues with scaling. By pulling the plug and dumping that many people on Lemmy now, all those people will be met with an error page instead of a viable Reddit alternative, driving them back to Reddit.
I can only hope it doesn’t actually play out like this…
This was my initial experience. Tried Lemmy, it wouldn’t let me sign up. Back to reddit. Tried again a day later (yesterday) on a different instance and it worked. People who aren’t so persistent might not try again though 🤷♂️