I don’t know if it’s just about reddit partnering with Google. It’s undeniable that years and years of enthusiasts having niche but public conversations about all manner of things makes it a gold mine for any search engine. People organically were adding “reddit” to their searches for years to find these conversations, way before it was a mechanism of avoiding garbage AI and SEO slop.

I still use reddit for this very reason. lemmy is great for me to learn about privacy, FOSS, and decentralization, but I have to use reddit to learn about Vermicomposting, which high quality leather boot I should invest in, and for niche subculture snark.

I’ve been helping some people bridge their Bluesky to mastodon by telling them that if/when they get pushed out of Bluesky due to enshittification, they will love having a mastodon presence already building. And if people use both, they can at least know there’s a back up of all their posts (great if you know any comedians or political advocates who are upset when they lose jokes/posts after being harassed and banned).