I really hope they lose tons of users

Some have.

You can take a look at which subs have “official” presences elsewhere here.

For example, I moderated /r/Disneyland, and we’re now over here at [email protected] (search https://kbin.social/m/Disneyland if that link doesn’t work for you on Lemmy, or @Disneyland on Kbin).

We do maintain a presence on Reddit. Although I personally avoid the site now, not all the others on the mod team feel the same, and some are still confused by the fediverse. We were closed for about a week before Reddit threatened to replace the mod team. At that point, we were afraid of a couple things:

• An inactive mod messaging the admins, becoming a scab, and removing the rest of the mod team. While most of us were in communication, there were some mods who were radio silent. Other places were seeing these scab mods get the top mod spot and decapitate the protest, forcing out all the remaining mods.

• If that didn’t happen, there’s another mod team of the WDW subreddit who is on bad terms with basically every other Disney sub. The WDW sub was cooperating with the admins, and there was a fear that Reddit would replace our entire mod team with theirs, where they’d be free to ban users randomly and spread COVID misinfo. Reddit was beginning to replace mod teams with ones from similar subreddits, so it was a real risk.

We considered different ways to protest. My idea was “only allow pictures of members of the Disney family standing on land. Ban any pictures of them in the water or on ladders.” But the top mod was spooked when she saw that Reddit was replacing entire mod teams, so she called for a full reopen with normal operations. However, we also linked to our Kbin magazine in the sidebar/announcement sticky and are now maintaining 2 communities in parallel so that if Reddit has another exodus we can have an established community already.

A lot of other mods are in the same boat. I’ve been in communication with the other mods in the protest, and the main problem is that different subreddits have different needs. The lack of AutoMod on both Lemmy and Kbin is a problem, and Kbin’s API is currently read-only so an AutoMod bot can’t even be made (but it is theoretically possible on Lemmy I think).

There are also concerns about confusion among users - see how I had to put the same link in 3 different ways when I said what community I mod? Lemmy has 2 different formats for links (depending on if someone in that instance is subscribed or not) and Kbin has a third (plus Kbin currently doesn’t support Lemmy-style links). Kbin is fixing this in their next update; I dunno if Lemmy has plans to fix it as well.

But the point is that this stuff is fixable, and Reddit is almost certainly going to do something dumb again. Digg didn’t die right away either, but there was a moment where there was an obvious sea change - and we’re seeing the same thing with Reddit now. Lemmy/Kbin will get better with time, whereas Reddit will only get worse. It’s important to get ahead of the curve and be ready for next time.

Hope? Many of us are already here. When they turn off the API tap, I am necessarily cut off from the rest of Reddit because I use it during the in-between times on my phone via Apollo.